Healthy Crops is an international research project with the aim 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 already developed a strategy to combat bacterial blight (BB) of rice, one of the most devastating rice diseases with a significant impact on small scale producers in low and middle-income countries. The team has already successfully generated BB-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). Recently, the team further reported the discovery of a blight outbreak in Tanzania and presented a modified an African rice variety resistant to the pathogen.

By now, we are working on a broad range of disease resistance that we want to offer to smallholder farmers in future.

The international research consortium consists of scientists from the Heinrich-Heine-University in Germany, the Universities of Florida and Missouri in the USA, the University of Nagoya in Japan, CIAT in Colombia, IRD in France, KALRO in Kenya, and ICAR institutes from India. We are pleased to welcome two new African partners. Together with the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI) and the National Centre of Applied Research and Rural Development (FOFIFA) in Madagascar we are working to provide Bacterial Blight resistant seeds in East Africa.

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