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02 January 2025 | Story Gerda-Marie van Rooyen | Photo Supplied
Prof Linus Franke
Leading the research in South Africa is Prof Linus Franke from the Department of Soil, Crop and Climate Sciences.

Scientists are actively pursuing the successful breeding of diploid hybrid potatoes from inbred lines. This is expected to revolutionise potato breeding as it holds the key to rapid genetic progress. It will introduce new varieties for commercialisation through seed. Currently, existing potato variants have a gene that renders self-pollinated seeds infertile.

Prof Linus Franke, an academic in the Department of Soil, Crop and Climate Sciences at the UFS, is leading the research in South Africa. “This technology allows the production of genetically uniform potato seed that is easy to transport and largely disease-free.” He says this differs from conventional breeding whereby only vegetative propagation is possible due to tetraploid varieties in potatoes. It also risks carrying pests and diseases from one generation to the next – leading to the accumulation of pests and diseases with each round of multiplication.

Seed innovation

Prof Franke explains that Solynta BV, a seed company based in the Netherlands that produces potato varieties that can be grown from seed, has included South Africa in their research efforts because it is one of Africa’s largest producers and exporters. Through his academic relationship with Wageningen University and Research, a Dutch institution renowned for its agricultural endeavours and food production, the UFS became involved in researching hybrid potatoes grown from seed.

Diploid seeds containing two sets of chromosomes allow easier gene manipulation to increase predictability and speedier genetic progress. The breeding approach enables the incorporation of tolerance to pests, diseases, abiotic stresses (cold, heat, drought) and other desired genetic traits.

Although Prof Franke is optimistic about this research, he is not blind to disadvantages. “Potato seeds are tiny and have little energy reserves, making it harder to grow potatoes from seed than from tubers.” He says potatoes from seed will take longer to cultivate than tubers, as farmers need to grow plantlets from seeds first, adding six weeks to the growing period. “It is possible that commercial farmers can grow potatoes directly from seed. Alternatively, perhaps more likely, specialised growers will produce tubers of potatoes from seed; these tubers are then sold as seed tubers to other potato farmers, who then continue their normal practices of producing potatoes for the market from tubers.”

Financial benefits

Prof Franke says farmers have reason to get excited. “Seed potatoes will reduce input costs, as varieties with enhanced tolerance to pests and diseases require less pesticides. Planting one hectare of potatoes requires three to four tonnes of potato tubers, but only one 25 g packet of potato seeds.” Since potatoes are a more valuable commodity than maize, this technology might also increase farmers’ income potential.

News Archive

The universal power of music and song to convey the unspeakable
2015-05-07

Philip Miller
Photo: Johan Roux

Spotlight photo: John Hodgkiss

Philip Miller, award-winning composer and sound artist, recently delivered the second instalment of the Vice-Chancellor’s Lecture Series on Trauma, Memory, and Representations of the Past on the Bloemfontein Campus. This lecture series forms part of a five-year research project led by Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. The series focuses on how the creative arts represent trauma and memory, and how these representations may facilitate the healing of historical wounds.

Disrupting the Silence: The Past and Transnational Memory
In Miller’s lecture, ‘Disrupting the Silence: The Past and Transnational Memory’, he discussed the creative process – and the far-researching effects – of his composition: ‘REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony’. The production consists of 4 soloists, an 80- to 100-member choir, a string octet, combined with gripping projected images and audio of victims testifying during the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) hearings.

While listening to those raw recordings, Miller would rewind continually and listen again. In between the sounds of the tape stretching and spooling, sighs, gulps for air, and moments when the speakers lost their speech, a hidden sound world revealed itself. And within these silences lay an entrenched trauma far more profound than the actual words spoken.

Communal remembering
When Miller asked Nomonde Calata how she felt about his using the recording of her heart-rending cry during her TRC testimony, her reply was poignant. For Calata, her cries – taken over by the voice of Sibongile Khumalo during the cantata – were a living memorial to her loving husband. “And it almost felt like a soothing balm to her traumatic loss,” Miller said.

“I believe that a collective body of people singing is a unique symbolic act of communal remembering. But more than that, it is a deep form of identification of our humanity, and allows for some form of catharsis for those testifiers who have attended the live performances. Just as a parent sings a lullaby to calm a crying child, the choir singing reaches those of us who continue to mourn.

“Music and song – and the arts in general – can convey the powerful stories of our nation without fearing to engage with the subject matter,” Miller said. “This I believe is the universal power of music and song: to convey a spiritual dimension to what perhaps is sometimes too graphic and painful to comprehend fully.”

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