From California to Kenya: The 2025 Cohort of the CRISPR Course for African Plant Scientists
The African Plant Breeders’ Association (AfBPA) CRISPR Course in Gene Editing for African Plant Scientists is a year-long program offered by the IGI in partnership with the African Orphan Crops Consortium, the Seed Biotechnology Center at UC Davis, and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, as part of the African Plant Breeding Academy. Learn more about the course here.
The course is led in part by IGI Investigator Dave Savage and taught by IGI Ph.D. candidate Evan Groover and IGI alum Nicholas Karavolias in Nairobi, Kenya. The aim of the course is to empower scientists from across Africa to use CRISPR for crop improvement.
Earlier this year, IGI Content Strategist Hope Henderson talked with IGI graduate student Evan Groover, just before he began teaching the third cohort of students.
How does the CRISPR course work?
We train scientists from across Africa in how to use CRISPR to edit crops. We deliver lectures and also hands-on lab training in banana, which is just about the hardest species that you could learn to gene edit. But once you can do that, you are ready for rice, teff, or maybe even an orphan crop. All of the students have a mandate from their government or research institute to work on a particular trait in a particular crop, and the first two cohorts are now on the path towards using CRISPR to make high-impact improvements for local agriculture.
What kind of potential for impact do you see from these scientists?
Back in October, the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC) hosted a meeting with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization with emissaries and thought leaders in global agriculture to reflect on the model of the AOCC breeding course. There are now over 250 graduates of the AOCC course whose breeding efforts feed tens of millions of people across Africa. Our CRISPR course piggybacks on that: we’re training molecular biologists now to go collaborate with those breeders, plug into the breeding pipelines that they have built, and accelerate crop improvement as is only possible by using gene editing. It’s been a little bit of a slow start because crop gene editing is a relatively new discipline, and requires bespoke reagents and equipment, but I think the direction that we’re heading in is positive, and the potential to combat food insecurity is immense.
How are students from the first two cohorts doing?
They have returned to their home institutions and are in the process of spinning up gene-editing projects. Many of them are using the funds that they’ve received for capacity building — buying equipment, reagents, and supplies for plant biotechnology — and all are disseminating what we taught them to their graduate students and postdocs.
A real strength of the course is that with each new cohort we take on, some of the new students will come from institutes where we’ve already trained someone in CRISPR. We’re hoping that these trainings are going to compound. Many members of our second cohort had already had some exposure by way of having a colleague or collaborator that was involved in the first training, and we’re starting to see some momentum built across the continent.
Tell me about the new cohort.
We have 11 students this year, a majority of whom are women, which is awesome. We specifically select students that operate in countries that have progressive gene-editing regulation, and where students will have access to an alum of the AOCC Breeding Course. This allows them to plug into established seed-distribution systems wherein gene editing stands to make a big impact.
Often people conceive of CRISPR as a tool that might replace traditional crop breeding, but the development of any gene-edited crop needs to interact with a breeder. A breeder has to consider the agronomic context of everything. And so I think one of the big challenges, but also one of the things we’ve really emphasized as we’ve structured this course, is making sure that the students understand the role of gene editing in the broader pipeline of crop improvement. It’s something that’s very easy to take for granted if you’re a molecular biologist like me, but when you really think about how seeds are produced and distributed, you need the whole infrastructure of contributors and stakeholders.
You’re completing your Ph.D. soon. Will you stay involved in the program once you move on from IGI?
Teaching the AfPBA CRISPR Course has been a hallmark of my training, and is a role I hope to continue into my postdoctoral years. I feel immensely privileged to be able to go across the world and talk to people who share my enthusiasm for this field. And it is just enormously fun to be able to interact and learn from each other!
One primary heuristic for determining what I will do next is what will allow me to do more work like this. There are still major problems that must be solved — in CRISPR tool development, functional genomics, and IP — to realize gene editing’s role in combating food security. I intend to use my future research program to help tackle those problems.
Learn more about the course here >
By
Hope Henderson
