IITA scientist wins prestigious Illumina Greater Good Initiative Grant

28 February 2022

IITA Molecular Geneticist Ranjana Bhattacharjee has won the 2022 prestigious Illumina Agricultural Greater Good Initiative Grant. The “annual grant program recognizes research proposals that will increase the sustainability, productivity, and nutritional density of agriculturally important crop and livestock species.” 

A statement released by Illumina says, “We are proud to announce the 2022 winner of our annual Greater Good Initiative Grant—Dr Ranjana Bhattacharjee and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA).” The statement highlighted that Bhattacharjee’s “work is helping to address food insecurities of low-income, food-deficit countries in Western Africa through the breeding of yams, a staple of diets in this region.” 

Grantees receive Illumina products and services equal to 20 trillion base pairs of data to support their projects. The annual program inspires critically needed research to increase “the sustainability, productivity, and nutritional density of agriculturally important crop and livestock species.” 

Bhattacharjee leads research addressing tangible real-world food insecurity in the sub-Saharan region with a high rate of unmet needs. She is particularly pleased with the prospect of creating a community resource that will have sustained benefits for the future work of IITA and the broader yam community. Through discussions with other researchers, Bhattacharjee has already identified yam viruses as one area to focus on, which will be extremely helpful to virologists. 

Bhattacharjee notes that because yam is considered an orphan crop that is mainly important for smallholder farmers in West Africa (Nigeria being one of the largest producers of yam tubers), it receives significantly less recognition than other crops. “The kind of data generated from this will give yam a globally recognized status. This is not just a winning situation for IITA, CGIAR, or myself; it is a winning situation for yam, which will now be recognized as a global crop in terms of sequencing data that will be generated.” 

IITA joins an exclusive list of winners, which now includes only three CGIAR centers—ICRISAT and ILRI, being the others. “I thank all the team members that have contributed towards this, directly or indirectly. We are excited that we can do the sequencing of so many yam species and genotypes and answer some of the questions we have been asking together for years,” said Bhattacharjee. 

Illumina launched the annual Agricultural Greater Good Initiative grants in 2011. The program selects a single winner and inspires critically needed research to increase “the sustainability, productivity, and nutritional density of agriculturally important crop and livestock species.” 

Though this is an annual award, the sequencing will continue until the researchers conclude the proposal’s objectives, which could extend to multiple years. “And though Illumina is a private organization, all data derived from this work will be publicly available as part of IITA’s Open Access data,” Bhattacharjee concluded.