Newsroom

December 2010

Following on the success of the first scientific meeting of the Regional Plant Biotechnology Forum at the University of Johannesburg earlier this year, the Forum recently held another meeting on 15 October at University of Pretoria under the auspices of the ACGT. (more…)

December 2010

The RISE (Regional Initiative in Science and Education) recently brought together students, academics, administrators and government representatives from its five member networks for its 2010 Conference. The Meeting was organised by the ACGT office and held from 5 to 8 October in Benoni, Gauteng.
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December 2011

The ACGT associate network, SABINA, was recently represented by Ella Nyakunu at the Joint Stakeholder Conference of the EU-ACP EDULINK and ACP Science & Technology Programmes. The Conference was held from 26 to 28 of October 2010, at the ACP House in Brussels. (more…)

December 2010

The Southern African Human Genome Programme has recently been successful in securing seed-funding from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) to kick-start the work of this ground-breaking national initiative. It is truly a national project which will involve a collaboration between scientists at education institutions, science councils, government and industry. ACGT’s partner institutions will be part of this project.
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June 2010

Following the success of the 2009 ACGT Regional Plant Biotechnology Forum workshop, the University of Johannesburg (UJ) hosted the Forum’s first scientific meeting on 25 May 2010. (more…)

May 2010

The preliminary 8X draft assembly of the E. grandis genome, which is being sequenced by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), is available from today in our public Eucalyptus Genome Database (EucalyptusDB).   Members of the Eucalyptus research community and the wider plant genomics community are invited to make use of this resource, which is already widely accessed.
Some notes on this release:

1. The genome browser in EucalyptusDB has been updated to Generic Genome Browser (GBrowse) version 2.0.
2. The browser for the preliminary 4.5X (checkpoint) assembly will remain accessible, but is currently also being updated to GBrowse 2.0.
3. The 8X assembly released on EucalyptusDB is the first draft assembly that incorporates all of the Sanger sequences produced for the  E. grandis genome.  The assembly is still being updated and the current release is therefore likely to be incomplete in some regions and will change in the next release.  A more complete draft assembly and draft annotation will be released on Phytozome later in 2010.
4. The draft 8X assembly consists of 6043 genome scaffolds covering 693 Mbp.  This total is somewhat inflated due to the fact that approximately 20% of the genome is currently assembling into two parallel haplotypes (both included in the 693 Mbp) due to very high heterozygosity in some regions of the E. grandis genome.  This will be resolved in the next release of the genome assembly.

The initial analysis of a high quality draft E. grandis genome sequence will be published in 2011.  The principal investigators and collaborators of the E. grandis Genome Project intend to publish genome-wide analyses of features such as genes, protein families, metabolic pathways, non-coding RNA and repetitive DNA in the main genome paper, associated papers and in subsequent publications.  Interested persons are encouraged to contact the principle investigators (Zander Myburg, Dario Grattapaglia or Jerry Tuskan to coordinate collaborative efforts aimed at producing such publications.
We also invite members of the Eucalyptus research community and all other interested persons to register as members on the EUCAGEN website.

Zander Myburg
EUCAGEN COORDINATOR 

April 2010

Sven Bergmann is an Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne in the Department of Medical Genetics, and is affiliated with the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics. (more…)

The ACGT was recently represented at the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) International technical conference on Agricultural Biotechnologies in Developing Countries (ABDC-10). (more…)

A world-class building promising to be an excellent example of a green building that is both effective and user-friendly will be erected at the University of Pretoria.

A sod-turning ceremony was held at the construction site of the new Plant Science building on Friday 29 January 2010. In her welcoming speech Prof Cheryl de la Rey, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Pretoria, described the occasion as symbolic of the successes of the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences and the University of Pretoria. Prof de la Rey said that this event marked the University’s commitment to 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity and that it was a “celebration of past successes and new beginnings”.
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February 2010 Related info National Health Laboratory Service

The ACGT was recently represented at the annual SAMI (South African Malaria Initiative) Conference 2010 in Cape St Francis. The meeting, which was held from 26 – 28 January, was followed by an open SAMI Steering Committee Meeting. (more…)