The Healthy Crops Project "Transformative Strategy for Controlling Rice Disease in Developing Countries" is an international research program funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

The aim of the project is to achieve significant yield increases for small scale producers in Africa and Asia by providing disease resistant rice varieties that can be introgressed with local elite lines.

To reach our goals we developed a strategy to combat “bacterial leaf blight” (BLB), one of the most devastating rice diseases with a significant impact on small scale producers in low and middle-income countries.

The international research consortium consists of scientists from the Heinrich-Heine-University in Germany, the Universities of Florida and Missouri in the USA, CIAT in Colombia, IRD in France, IRRI in the Philippines and in Kenya, and ICAR institutes from India.

The team has already successfully generated BLB-resistant rice lines and created a diagnostic toolbox that enables a rapid disease diagnosis of the newly occurring pathogenic bacterial strains (both published in Nature Biotechnology in 2019).

Due to the international interconnectedness of our institution, all pages on this website are in English only.

It doesn't matter whether you are producing, selling, exporting, researching or just eating rice... Follow us on Twitter or Facebook to receive the latest news and updates about our research on bacterial blight resistant rice varieties for smallholder farmers in developing countries.