Meeting 2022-09-21: Feed the Future Innovation Labs Annual Meeting

The Genomics to Improve Poultry Innovation Lab (GIP-IL) was invited to Feed the Future Innovation Labs Director’s Meeting 2022. The Director of the GIP program, Dr. Zhou, presented the major activity for this past year the program’s progress of applying advanced genetics and genomics technologies to enhance innate resistance to Newcastle Disease (ND) in indigenous chickens. The primary purpose of the Feed the Future Innovation Labs (FTFIL) meeting was to exhibit how the Innovation Labs are strengthening food systems in Africa, identify game-changing research that has significant potential to address food insecurity, and show how the Innovation Labs are inclusive and work at the local level to translate their research into scalable solutions. The GIP-IL program presented the recent program activities and results of applying the developed genomics selection platform for selective breeding of indigenous chickens with enhanced resilience to NDV ecotype chickens and heat stress, and the completed trials data that determined the feasibility to select for economically important traits (e.g., growth rate and egg production) in parallel with enhanced NDV resistance. The GIP director presented the partners’ progress in characterizing the circulating strains of the ND virus in Ghana and Tanzania to comprehend better the epidemiology of the ND and the distribution of the virus in Africa. The team also participated in the FTFIL 2022 mural exhibit, displaying the GIP indicators, a video, and a poster representing the program’s progress and activities. https://bit.ly/3BONSLs

https://docs.google.com/document/d/125JKisZ3ZP2NHuiF6toQeqFfL8mFf7hoLFHYwy5jE1c/edit