Bulelani Sizani

Agricultural Research Council, South Africa

Abstract Title:

Advancing food security: Traditional african cucurbits and landraces biodiversity and their agronomic importance

Biography:

Dr Sizani is a system biologist with strong commitment to scientific excellence and personnel development. Passionate about research, development, and innovation. He has over five years’ experience in Natural Science lecturing, supervision, and project management. His research focus is on bridges academic research and technology commercialization, fostering collaboration between small scale farmers, public institutions and private sector partners to develop impactful applied solutions across Africa.

Research Interests:

With over 14,000 edible and nutritious plants in the world, only three crops make up 60% of the world’s dietary needs, underlining opportunities to use underutilized crops to build resilient food systems. These underutilised and underexplored edible plants are on the verge of extinction posing a serious risk of losing food biodiversity resulting in low agrodiversity. The assimilation of underutilised crops into food systems requires detailed research studies on their biodiversity, nutritional, agronomical, and genetic traits to attract exploration of these plants. Using African cucurbits family as a model, this project seeks to develop a participatory approach for the valorisation of indigenous southern African species based on species biodiversity, agroecological practices and possible applications in soil improvement. We have collected traditional cultivars and landrace of the members of cucurbits family that are native to southern Africa. Most of the fruits of the landraces have a bitter taste but their leaves are mostly collected and cooked as vegetables and usually have a sweet taste. Moreover, most of the species collected are highly symptomatic and displayed severe bacterial, fungal and virus-like infection symptoms. We performed comparative genomics on these southern African cucurbits species to gain an insight on their evolutionary relationship. Moreover, the rhizosphere from 50 African cucurbits were collected to evaluate the suitability of indigenous southern African cucurbits species as cover crops. These results are used to develop methodologies for integrating African underutilised and indigenous crops into food systems and in turn diversifying our food basket.