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Plant breeding enhances crop improvement

15 September 2020 | Story Leonie Bolleurs | Photo Supplied

Dr van Biljon — Dr Angeline van Biljon was elected as a member of the Southern African Plant Breeders’ Association (SAPBA) executive committee.

Ever wondered how seedless fruit such as lemons, watermelons, and grapes came to be?

Dr Angeline van Biljon, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of the Free State (UFS), was recently elected as a member of the Southern African Plant Breeders’ Association (SAPBA) executive committee where she will serve until March 2022.

She says it is a privilege to be a member of the team. “It is an opportunity to bring plant breeding to the community so that more people can know about the subject. For example, that seedless lemons, grapes, and watermelons does not just happen; that orange sweet potatoes with high beta-carotene are bred to combat vitamin A deficiency; and that wheat quality is important to make a good loaf of bread.”

This position also brings with it the possibility for her students to work closely with people in industry. “Other members of the committee are breeders in seed and breeding companies,” explains Dr Van Biljon.

Contributing on other platforms

She was nominated and elected for this position during the SAPBA conference that was held at the Future Africa campus in Pretoria. Besides serving on the executive committee of SAPBA, she is involved with and are serving on several other platforms where she is making a difference in the plant breeding industry.

Dr Van Biljon collaborates on wheat quality with researchers in the wheat industry at the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), Small Grain in Bethlehem. “I’m also a committee member of the Cereal Science and Technology – Southern African Association.”

For the past two years, she has been giving online lectures on biofortification as part of a National Research Foundation/Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT/NRF) group in Alnarp in Sweden. However, she states a working visit to the Nanjing Agricultural University in Nanjing, China as one of her biggest highlights.

Today, I want to help students see the difference plant breeding can make in crop improvement and food security.

The difference plant breeding can make

Although genetics was one of her passions as student, she later found herself as a flower breeder at the ARC Roodeplaat. Years later, she returned to the UFS to complete her PhD in Plant Breeding. And today, she wants to help students see the difference plant breeding can make in crop improvement and food security.

Currently, Dr Van Biljon is focusing on her research, which is the study of the nutritional value of various crops by determining, among others, the beta-carotene values of butternuts, the starch quality of wheat, and the tryptophan value of quality protein maize. “I also look at the influence of abiotic stress on the crop quality and nutritional value of various crops,” she adds.

News Archive

Prof Helene Strauss delves into the emotion and politics of contemporary South African protest cultures

2014-12-22

Prof Helene Strauss from the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Department of English currently researches the relationship between emotion and politics in contemporary South African public and protest cultures.

The research foregrounds the complex set of concerns opened up by a study of intimacy, read as not simply a sign for emotional and sexual closeness, but more broadly as a complexly mediated site from which to observe the embodied, affective coordinates of various forms of control and contestation. Through the analysis of a range of cultural texts that, for instance, recompose moments of spectacular social upheaval through the lenses of everyday, embodied experience, this research considers what aesthetic responsibility might mean in both post-transitional South Africa and elsewhere.

One aspect of this research charts a gradual shift in South Africa from what is frequently referred to as the ‘liberation euphoria’ of the mid- to late 1990s – and the optimistic fantasies of a future South Africa that characterised dominant public discourse in the period immediately following the political transition – toward an emotional culture in which expressions of anger, disillusionment and disappointment seem to have become relatively widespread.

Prof Strauss asks, for instance, how these public feelings have been managed in the aftermath of events such as the Marikana massacre, and suggests that the affective and temporal dimensions of current attempts at containing perceived threats to financial and political stability on the part of South Africa’s business and political elite are key to understanding increasingly violent and repressive securitisation strategies.

Earlier this year, Prof Strauss presented papers on aspects of this research at two international conferences: (i) the Association for Cultural Studies conference in Tampere, Finland, where she was invited to be part of a ‘Spotlight Panel’ on the topic of African Cultural Studies, (ii) and at a conference at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, which she helped to co-organise.

An article based on some of this work has been published in the journal Safundi.

For more of Prof Strauss’s research published in journals, follow the links below:
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rsaf20/current#.VAf88_mSxqU
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/riij20/15/1#.VAf80vmSxqU
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/sub/journal/v4/n2/index.html

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