Sequencing West Africa’s “Yam Belt” For Food Security

 Stacks of hairy yams line a market in Ibadan, where traders haggle over quality and price before loading them into cars for the last mile to Nigerian consumers. Nearby, a man navigates heavy traffic with a hand cart piled high with the tubers.

Yams – pounded into paste, ground into flour, boiled or fried – provide sustenance and livelihoods across West Africa. But growing conditions across the “yam belt” from Guinea to Cameroon are deteriorating just as prices of other staples soar.

Vendor Adewale Elekun said farmers in Nigeria are already finding life harder than in the past, when soil was good and the land fertile.

“Today the quality of the soil has faded,” he said, amidst the bustle of the market.

Elsewhere in Ibadan, a transit and tech startup hub 130 km (80 miles) northeast of Lagos, molecular geneticist Dr Ranjana Bhattacharjee says she hopes to change things for the better by helping to create hardier and more adaptable plants.

She is working at the city’s International Institute of Tropical Agriculture to complete whole-genome sequencing of around 1,000 yam samples – work she says paves the way for moves to ensure future crops are more adaptable to a changing climate.

“If you want to make an improvement in crops, then you have to do genome sequencing to understand the genes of your targeted traits like disease resistance (and) quality,” Bhattacharjee said.

The need to boost locally grown crops is particularly acute because of global food price rises since some major producing countries decided to export less food and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine blocked that country’s grain and sunflower seed exports.

Yams, bigger than their unrelated north American namesake, symbolize prosperity, wealth and even fertility in West Africa.

Sequencing their genomes could help West African farmers, who grow some 90% of all yams worldwide, improve their yield and keep it high, said Bhattacharjee, adding once the results are published, others will work on applying them.

“That will then ultimately lead to food security, not only in Nigeria but also in West Africa where the yam is being grown,” she said.

Source: Reuters

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Conjoined Twins Separated With The Help Of Virtual Reality

 Brazilian twins who were joined at the head have been successfully separated with the help of virtual reality.

Three-year-olds Bernardo and Arthur Lima underwent surgeries in Rio de Janeiro, with direction from Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

The teams spent months trialling techniques using virtual reality projections of the twins, based on CT and MRI scans.

It was described by surgeon Noor ul Owase Jeelani as “space-age stuff”.

It was one of the most complex separation processes ever completed, according to the charity which funded it – Gemini Untwined – which Mr Jeelani founded in 2018.

He said that, for the first time, surgeons in separate countries wore headsets and operated in the same “virtual reality room” together.

The twins had seven surgeries, involving more than 27 hours of operating time in the final operation alone, and almost 100 medical staff.

‘Man-on-Mars stuff’

Speaking about the VR aspect of the surgery, Mr Jeelani told the PA news agency: “It’s just wonderful. It’s really great to see the anatomy and do the surgery before you actually put the children at any risk.

“You can imagine how reassuring that is for the surgeons.

“In some ways, these operations are considered the hardest of our time, and to do it in virtual reality was just really man-on-Mars stuff.”

He said that previously unsuccessful attempts to separate the boys meant their anatomy was complicated by scar tissue, and he was “really apprehensive” about the risky procedure.

Mr Jeelani said he was “absolutely shattered” after the 27-hour operation, where he took only four 15-minute breaks for food and water, but it was “wonderful” to see the family feeling “over the moon” afterward.

He added that, as with all conjoined twins after separation, the boys’ blood pressures and heart rates were “through the roof” – until they were reunited four days later and touched hands.

The twins are recovering well in hospital and will be supported with six months of rehabilitation.

Life-changing

This was Mr Jeelani’s sixth separation procedure with Gemini Untwined, after previously operating on twins from Pakistan, Sudan, Israel and Turkey.

He led the procedure alongside Dr Gabriel Mufarrej, head of paediatric surgery at Instituto Estadual do Cerebro Paulo Niemeyer in Brazil.

Dr Mufarrej said the hospital where he works has been caring for the boys for two-and-a-half years, and their separation will be “life-changing”.

“Since the parents of the boys came from their home in the Roraima region to Rio to seek our help two-and-a-half years ago, they have become part of our family here in the hospital. We are delighted that the surgery went so well.”

Bernardo and Arthur, at almost four years of age, are the oldest craniopagus twins – that is twins with a fused brain – to have been separated.

According to the charity, one in 60,000 births results in conjoined twins, and only 5% of those are craniopagus.

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US invests $280bn in high tech to compete with China

 US President Joe Biden has signed a law committing $280bn (£232bn) to high tech manufacturing and scientific research amid fears the country is losing its technological edge to China.

The investments include tax breaks for companies that build computer chip manufacturing plants in the US.

Business groups have long pushed for more government support, citing the need to reduce reliance on China.

A global shortage of microchips increased the urgency of their calls.

Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said the bill was a “game changer” that would ensure American leadership and prosperity in the next century.

“Authoritarians were cheering for us to lose and hoping we sit on our hands,” he said. “By enacting the CHIPS and Science Act we are making clear we believe another great American century lies on the horizon.”

The US currently produces roughly 10% of the global supply of semiconductors, which are key to everything from cars to mobile phones, down from nearly 40% in 1990.

The country is not alone in its investments in the industry.

The European Union this spring said it would commit more than €40bn to boost production of computer chips, while China has also been boosting its investments in science and technology.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington had opposed the semiconductor bill, calling it reminiscent of a “Cold War mentality.”

In addition to the chip investments, the bill directs about $200bn to agencies such as the National Science Foundation, aiming to boost investments in fields like robotics and wireless communications.

Mr Biden called it a “once in a generation” investment and said it was already yielding growth in the US, pointing to plans from Micron to spend $40bn on memory chip manufacturing, a project expected to create 40,000 jobs.

It is the latest accomplishment for the White House, which also recently clinched a deal to advance a sweeping plan to combat climate change.

Unlike that plan, which was opposed by Republicans, this bill was supported by both parties, despite marking a large expansion of the role of the US government into a domain often left to the private sector.

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