Decreasing The Knowledge Gap for Finger Millet

May 11, 2022

By Kaine Korzekwa

The grain called finger millet may not be well-known outside of Africa, but it is an important crop to the region. Finger millet has been farmed in eastern Africa for thousands of years. However, breeding the crop for better traits has been difficult for local farmers.

This image shows healthy finger millet plants in a field trial in Ethiopia. Finger millet is a well-known and important crop grown in Africa

This image shows healthy finger millet plants in a field trial in Ethiopia. Finger millet is a well-known and important crop grown in Africa.

Katrien Devos, a professor at the University of Georgia, and her colleagues are collaborating with scientists from Kenya to improve the grain’s yield and quality. “Breeding has traditionally been done, and is still often done, by selecting improved lines within existing cultivars,” she explained. “Breeders essentially rely on occasional spontaneous outcrossing events in which pollination occurs with pollen from a nearby growing variety rather than self-pollen to generate new combinations. We have been working with breeders in eastern Africa to bring finger millet breeding into the 21st century."

This study was published in the Plant Genome Journal, a publication of the Crop Science Society of America.

The team set out to find a way to provide breeders with better tools to improve millet traits in a targeted way. This meant digging into the DNA of finger millet to find genes that are responsible for beneficial traits. This is no easy task, says Devos.

The researchers used a technique called genotyping-by-sequencing. This is a form of sequencing where a small portion of the genome is sequenced that represents the broader whole. This saves time and money and allows the researchers to have enough data for genetic mapping. This mapping allowed them to find potential genes or areas on the genome responsible for certain traits, called quantitative trait loci.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids