Fourth Annual Review Meeting (2022)

The fourth Annual Review Meeting took place at the ICRISAT campus in Hyderabad, India, on October 19-20, 2022. A total of 74 participants attended, including 8 women and 66 men from partner countries. The inaugural session focused on the theme “Targeted Approaches to Address Climate Change Effects in South Asia.” B. M. Prasanna presented on “Strengthening Maize Breeding Pipelines in South Asia: Challenges and Opportunities,” discussing the reduction of breeding cycle time through double haploid breeding, scaling climate-resilient maize varieties, product life cycle management, varietal turnover, and the evolving needs of breeding programs and seed systems. Mitch Tuinstra from Purdue University followed with a presentation on “Integrating Genomics and Phenomics in Breeding Climate-Resilient Maize.” Dr. Abdu Rahman, a maize seed system specialist, spoke on the synergy between the Nepal Seed & Fertilizer Project (NSAF) and HTMA and its impact on maize in Nepal. Karoll Jessenia and Quijano Escalante from Purdue University presented on the use of multi-modal remote sensing with UAVs for plant phenotyping. The technical session concluded with each country partner team presenting progress in targeted agro-ecologies and outlining workplans for the next year.