Food security: US-based Nigerian spearheads research into diseases limiting productivity in agricultural crops

A Nigerian researcher based in the United States of America, Dotun Olaoye, is working to combat plant diseases limiting the productivity potential of agricultural crops in the world.

The researcher who most recently worked for a globally renowned agrochemical company, Syngenta in the United States on Tuesday spoke about some of his efforts on managing the huge crop loss chiefly attributed to several plant diseases.

Speaking on the role of plant disease management in achieving food security for sub-saharan African countries and the world at large, Olaoye said, “the sustainable management of plant diseases calls for serious attention and commitment among critical stakeholders just as common in other systems like animal or human health.”

“I recall how I started out making significant contributions to research projects on managing fusarium wilt of tomato at the Tissue Culture Laboratory as an undergraduate student studying for a bachelor’s degree in crop protection at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria.

“Following the completion of my bachelor’s, I got a competitive research internship position at the plant pathology and mycotoxin unit of the globally renowned International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) Ibadan, Nigeria. Thereafter, I got a competitive scholarship to study for a master’s degree in plant breeding, genetics and pathology at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. USA.

“Beside many projects I executed or engaged in, my master’s thesis focused on evaluating cultivars, breeding lines and worldwide germplasm collection of spinach against races of the downy mildew pathogen (Peronospora effusa) and developing molecular tools and resources that could be used for breeding and developing new durable and downy mildew-resistant spinach cultivars for growers in the United States and across the world. The global economic value of spinach is over $300m and the major disease is downy mildew – this makes my research work highly relevant and critical,” he explained.

He highlighted further, “I adopted several cutting-edge approaches and new generation genomic technologies to ensure downy mildew resistance genes and sources are identified and documented in spinach. Essentially, my research identified many downy mildew-resistant spinach cultivars or genotypes and developed new molecular tools that could be deployed in breeding programs in all growing regions of the world. This means that spinach farmers or growers anywhere in the world including Africa are now empowered with more resources to tackle downy mildew.

“Moreover, many findings from all my works have been published in peer-reviewed journals and other researchers are already using my work in further studies, even as I continue to collaborate with many researchers across the world.”

Speaking about his role as a pathology research specialist at Syngenta, he said “I contributed to several important and practical projects on disease resistance genetics towards the release of new cultivars of crops like field corn, sweet corn, soybean and snapbean for the North America market. To simply put, I am responsible for assessing thousands of plants of different crops against different pathogens before new cultivars are released to the market – and this underscores my critical role owing to my expertise.”

Taken together, the significant contributions and huge achievement made by Olaoye can be attributed to his outstanding qualities as a researcher and his passion for scientific advancement.

Olaoye is currently working on his PhD in Genetics at the University of Missouri-Columbia, adopting high throughput phenotyping, computational modelling and genomics approaches.