The African Orphan Crops Consortium, alleviating stunting due to malnutrition one crop at a time

Bernice Waweru0
(0) Bioinformatics at International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

Abstract
The African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC) is a global partnership promoting strategic, genome-enabled improvement of under-researched crops for biodiversity-based nutritious food solutions in Africa. We present current status, opportunities and examples successes of AOCC. Orphan crops like Lablab (Lablab purpureus; ~452 Mbp), African Yam bean (Sphenostylis stenocarpa; ~800 Mbp) and Moringa (Moringa oleifera; ~315 Mbp), are often of high nutritive value and are climate resilient. The Oxford Nanopore MinION was used to generate long reads of all three crops, to compliment and generate contiguous draft genome assemblies. Work is under way to improve these assemblies to chromosome-scale using Hi-C mapping.