WASHINGTON (AP) — A major contractor behind the federal health insurance exchange website told the government last month it didn't have enough time to test its product.
CGI Federal also told the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in a memo that it couldn't get access to computer logs that would have pinpointed potential problems. The contractor labeled that issue as "severe" as recently as June, and said a compressed schedule didn't allow enough time for adequate testing.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform asked CGI Federal for the documents last week. It released them to the public late Tuesday.
The HealthCare.gov website is a key part of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, but its high-profile failures have marred the site since it launched Oct. 1.
The programming world is made up of virtual city-states that tend to keep to themselves. The device driver authors rarely share much code or ideas with the server app creators. The Windows hackers don't talk with the Mac programmers. It's as if some emperor decreed that Java City will always be at war with C-ville.
That reality is changing rapidly as one language, JavaScript, breaks out of its once simple life of popping up alert boxes to tell people that they needed to fill out every form field marked with a red asterisk. This is most apparent in the mobile world where more and more developers are building mobile apps with JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, then bundling them with a thin, native wrapper. Sure, the JavaScript code isn't always as responsive as the pure native code, but it runs on all of the major mobile platforms -- and in your desktop browser. It's the fastest way to create cross-platform apps.
JavaScript is making these inroads because tablets and phones are growing incredibly powerful, at least compared to their anemic predecessors. The fifth generation of the iPad may actually be 70 times faster than the first generation at some tasks. The new tablets and phones have so much horsepower that they don't always need the speed and simplicity of native code. If the workload isn't too heavy, they can do a good job with HTML5. Why not get all of the cross-platform simplicity if it works well enough? (For more information on what happens afterward, see our review of PhoneGap and related tools.)
But smartphone programmers aren't the only ones interested. For many people, the smartphone is their main way for accessing the Internet. A larger and larger percentage of the mail I get comes with a little disclaimer at the bottom asking me to disregard any typos because it was written on an iPhone or an Android phone. (The BlackBerry keyboards never seemed to need this, for some reason.) If regular websites want to follow the crowd, they need to generate pages that look good on the tiny screen. They can't assume that everyone is reading the information on a desktop box. That means the Web designers are interested in many of the same techniques as the mobile app designers.
All of this makes it a good time to look at a few of the most prominent frameworks for building complicated applications out of just HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. These tools -- jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, Telerik's Kendo UI, and Intel App Framework -- are designed to present information in a beautiful way on the small and not-so-small screen. They marry the convenience of HTML with a smartphone- and tablet-centric design. They're the quickest way to get working apps on the new devices.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — An official at the global chemical weapons watchdog said Thursday Syria has completed destruction of critical equipment for producing chemical weapons and filling munitions with poison gas.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had not yet made the announcement public.
The announcement comes one day ahead of the Nov. 1 deadline set by the Hague-based organization for Damascus to destroy or "render inoperable" all chemical weapon production facilities and machinery for mixing chemicals into poison gas and filling munitions.
Destruction of the equipment means that Syria can no longer produce new chemical weapons. However Damascus still has to start destroying existing weapons and stockpiles. The country is believed to have around 1,000 metric tons of chemicals and weapons including mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin.
Completion of the initial stage of destruction, overseen by a joint United Nations-OPCW team in Syria, is a significant milestone in an ambitious timeline that aims to destroy all of Damascus' chemical weapons by mid-2014.
Inspectors said earlier this week they had completed their first round of verification work, visiting 21 of 23 sites declared by Damascus. Inspectors were unable to visit two sites because of security concerns, underscoring the risky nature of a mission to destroy Syria's chemical arsenal in the midst of an ongoing civil war.
Syria has submitted a plan for the total destruction of its chemical weapons that has to be approved next month by the OPCW's executive committee.
Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Koji Uehara and catcher David Ross celebrate after getting St. Louis Cardinals' Matt Carpenter to strike out and end Game 6 of baseball's World Series Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013, in Boston. The Red Sox won 6-1 to win the series. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Koji Uehara and catcher David Ross celebrate after getting St. Louis Cardinals' Matt Carpenter to strike out and end Game 6 of baseball's World Series Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013, in Boston. The Red Sox won 6-1 to win the series. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
Boston Red Sox's David Ortiz carries relief pitcher Koji Uehara after winning Game 6 of baseball's World Series against the St. Louis CardinalsWednesday, Oct. 30, 2013, in Boston. The Red Sox won 6-1 to win the series. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Koji Uehara jumps into David Ross's arms after defeating the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 6 of baseball's World Series Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013, in Boston. The Red Sox won 6-1 to win the series. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Koji Uehara and catcher David Ross celebrate after getting St. Louis Cardinals' Matt Carpenter to strike out and end Game 6 of baseball's World Series Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013, in Boston. The Red Sox won 6-1 to win the series. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
St. Louis Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina looks back as home plate umpire Adam Wainwright call Boston Red Sox's Jonny Gomes safe on a three run RBI double by Shane Victorino during the third inning of Game 6 of baseball's World Series Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013, in Boston. Left is Jacoby Ellsbury, Xander Bogaerts, center and second right, David Ortiz. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)
BOSTON (AP) — The old ballpark was packed for a celebration nearly a century in the making.
Players danced around the infield with their families.
Fans remained in the stands, savoring a long-awaited moment generations of New Englanders had never been able to witness.
Turmoil to triumph. Worst to first. A clincher at Fenway Park.
David Ortiz and the Boston Red Sox, baseball's bearded wonders, capped their remarkable turnaround by beating the St. Louis Cardinals 6-1 in Game 6 on Wednesday night to win their third World Series championship in 10 seasons.
When it was over, Ortiz took a microphone on the field and addressed the city, just as he did a week after the marathon bombings last April.
"This is for you, Boston. You guys deserve it," the Series MVP said. "We've been through a lot this year and this is for all of you and all those families who struggled."
And the Red Sox didn't even have to fly the trophy home. For the first time since Babe Ruth's team back in 1918, Boston won the title at Fenway. The 101-year-old stadium, oldest in the majors, was jammed with 38,447 singing, shouting fans anticipating a party that had been building for more than nine decades.
"Maybe they won't have to go another 95 years," said John Farrell, a champion in his first season as Boston's manager.
Shane Victorino, symbolic of these resilient Sox, returned from a stiff back and got Boston rolling with a three-run double off the Green Monster against rookie sensation Michael Wacha. Pumped with emotion, Victorino pounded his chest with both fists three times.
John Lackey became the first pitcher to start and win a Series clincher for two different teams, allowing one run over 6 2-3 innings 11 years after his Game 7 victory as an Angels rookie in 2002.
With fans roaring on every pitch and cameras flashing, Koji Uehara struck out Matt Carpenter for the final out. The Japanese pitcher jumped into the arms of catcher David Ross while Red Sox players rushed from the dugout and bullpen as the Boston theme "Dirty Water" played on the public-address system.
There wasn't the "Cowboy Up!" comeback charm of "The Idiots" from 2004, who swept St. Louis to end an 86-year title drought. There wasn't that cool efficiency of the 2007 team that swept Colorado.
This time, they were Boston Strong — playing for a city shaken by tragedy.
"We've dealt with a lot," Dustin Pedroia said. "But our team came together."
After a late-season collapse in 2011, the embarrassing revelations of a fried chicken-and-beer clubhouse culture that contributed to the ouster of manager Terry Francona, and the daily tumult of Bobby Valentine's one-year flop, these Red Sox grew on fans.
Just like the long whiskers on the players' faces, starting with Jonny Gomes' scruffy spring training beard.
"As soon as we went to Fort Myers, the movie's already been written," Gomes said. "All we had to do was press play, and this is what happened."
The only player remaining from the 2004 champs, Ortiz had himself a Ruthian World Series. He batted .688 (11 for 16) with two homers, six RBIs and eight walks — including four in the finale — for a .760 on-base percentage in 25 plate appearances, the second-highest in Series history.
"We have a lot of players with heart. We probably don't have the talent that we had in '07 and '04, but we have guys that are capable (of staying) focused and do the little things," Ortiz said.
Even slumping Stephen Drew delivered a big hit in Game 6, sending Wacha's first pitch of the fourth into the right-center bullpen for a 4-0 lead. By the time the inning was over, RBI singles by Mike Napoli and Victorino had made it 6-0, and the Red Sox were on their way.
"Hey, I missed two games. It's time to shine," Victorino said.
All over New England, from Connecticut's Housatonic River up to the Aroostook in Maine, Boston's eighth championship can be remembered for the beard-yanking bonding.
Fans bid up the average ticket price to over $1,000 on the resale market and some prime locations went for more than $10,000 each. Nearly all the Red Sox rooters stood in place for 30 minutes after the final out to view the presentation of the trophy and MVP award. A few thousand remained when a beaming Ortiz came back on the field with his son 75 minutes after the final out.
"It was an awesome atmosphere here," Lackey said.
The win capped an emotional season for the Red Sox, one heavy with the memory of the events that unfolded on Patriots Day, when three people were killed and more than 260 wounded in bombing attacks at the Boston Marathon. The Red Sox wore "Boston Strong" logos on their left sleeves, erected a large emblem on the Green Monster and moved the logo into the center-field grass as a constant reminder.
"There's I think a civil responsibility that we have wearing this uniform, particularly here in Boston," Farrell said. "And it became a connection initially, the way our guys reached out to individuals or to hospital visits. And it continued to build throughout the course of the season. I think our fans, they got to a point where they appreciated the way we played the game, how they cared for one another. And in return they gave these guys an incredible amount of energy to thrive on in this ballpark."
Red, white and blue fireworks fired over the ballpark as Commissioner Bud Selig presented the World Series trophy to Red Sox owners John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino, leaving a haze over the field.
"When the fireworks went off at the presentation of the trophy out there, when the ballpark was filled with smoke, it was completely surreal," Farrell said. "To be in this position, given where we've come from, reflecting back a year ago at this time, there's been a lot that's happened in 13 months."
Players then put on goggles for a champagne celebration in the cramped clubhouse.
"They just found ways to win," Henry said. "At some point you have to think there's something special happening here."
Among the players blamed for the indifferent culture at the end of the Francona years, Lackey took the mound two days shy of the second anniversary of his elbow surgery and got his first Series win since the 2002 clincher. He pitched shutout ball into the seventh, when Carlos Beltran's RBI single ended the Cardinals' slump with runners in scoring position at 0 for 14.
Junichi Tazawa came in with the bases loaded and retired Allen Craig on an inning-ending grounder to first. Brandon Workman followed in the eighth and Uehara finished.
St. Louis had been seeking its second title in three seasons, but the Cardinals sputtered after arriving in Boston late Tuesday following a seven-hour flight delay caused by mechanical problems. Symbolic of the team's struggles, reliever Trevor Rosenthal tripped while throwing a pitch to Ortiz in the eighth, balking Pedroia to second.
"They were some frustrated guys in there, but overall you can't ask us to go about any better than how our guys did," Cardinals manager Mike Matheny said. "Not too many people expected us to do what we did."
Wacha entered 4-0 with a 1.00 ERA in his postseason career but gave up six runs, five hits and four walks in 3 2-3 innings, the shortest start of the 22-year-old's big league career.
"I just made too many mistakes," he said. "It doesn't matter how hard you're throwing if you can't locate it."
Boston was a 30-1 underdog to win the World Series last winter but joined the 1991 Minnesota Twins as the only teams to win titles one season after finishing in last place. Now, the Red Sox will raise another championship flag before their home opener next season April 4 against Milwaukee.
Boston hit just .211, the lowest average for a Series champion in 39 years and 13 points lower than the Cardinals. But after falling behind 2-1 in the Series on the first-game ending obstruction call in postseason history, the Red Sox tied it the following night on the first-game ending pickoff in postseason play. That sparked the Red Sox to three straight wins and another title.
"When we started rolling," Ortiz said, "nobody ever stopped the train."
NOTES: Boston also won the Series at Fenway Park in 1912. The Red Sox won the first World Series in 1903 at the Huntington Avenue Grounds and in 1916 at Braves Field. ... Catfish Hunter and Jimmy Key each won Series clinchers for two clubs, as a starter and reliever. ... Freese, the 2011 World Series MVP, hit .158 (3 for 19) with no RBIs.
NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook's latest quarterly results showed continued strength in mobile advertising, which spurred a 60 percent revenue increase in the July-September quarter.
The numbers beat Wall Street's expectations for the second consecutive quarter, but after an initial after-hours trading spike, Facebook's stock took a downturn during the company's conference call with analysts.
Investors may have been spooked by a remark by Facebook finance chief David Ebersman, who said the company saw a decrease in daily use among younger teenagers, an important but fickle demographic.
After soaring as much as 18 percent to $57.98 after the quarterly results came out, shares of Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook slid to $48.44 in extended trading during the company's conference call. The stock had closed Wednesday's regular trading day down 39 cents at $49.01.
The stock's fluctuations overshadowed a stellar quarter. The world's largest social network said Wednesday that it earned $425 million, or 17 cents per share, in the third quarter. That's up from a loss of $59 million, or 2 cents per share, in the same period a year ago.
Adjusted earnings were $621 million, or 25 cents per share, in the latest quarter. That's 6 cents better than analysts expected. This figure excludes special items, mainly stock compensation expenses.
Revenue grew 60 percent to $2.02 billion from $1.26 billion, helped by increasing mobile advertising revenue.
Analysts, on average, were expecting revenue of $1.91 billion, according to FactSet.
"The strong results we achieved this quarter show that we're prepared for the next phase of our company, as we work to bring the next five billion people online and into the knowledge economy," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.
Facebook's advertising revenue was $1.8 billion, up 66 percent from a year ago. Mobile ads accounted for 49 percent of the company's total ad revenue during the quarter. In the second quarter, mobile ads amounted to 41 percent of the total. The increase shows Facebook's strategy to become a "mobile-first" company is paying off.
At the same time, Facebook is growing its share of the mobile advertising market. Research firm eMarketer estimates that Facebook will grab 15.8 percent of the world's mobile ad spending this year, up from 5.4 percent last year. Google Inc., meanwhile, is expected to capture 53.2 percent this year, up slightly from a 52.4 percent share in 2012.
There were 1.19 billion Facebook users as of the end of September, up 18 percent from a year ago. Of these, an average of 728 million users logged in every day during the month of September, up 25 percent from a year ago.
Facebook had 874 million monthly mobile users at the end of the quarter, up 45 percent year-over-year. In a conference call with analysts, though, Ebersman said that the company saw a decrease in daily use among younger teenagers. That's been a concern for some analysts who fear young people are migrating to newer sites. Luckily for Facebook, this includes the photo-sharing service it owns, Instagram.
As expected, the quarter's operating expenses increased as Facebook continued to invest in growing its staff and enhancing its technical infrastructure. Total costs were $1.28 billion in the latest quarter, up 45 percent from $885 million a year ago. The company ended the quarter with nearly 5,800 employees, up 34 percent from a year earlier.
Facebook went public in May 2012 at $38 per share. It took the stock more than a year to surpass that price as the company worked to prove that it could grow mobile advertising revenue at a time when an increasing number of its users were accessing it on cellphones and tablet computers. Facebook didn't start showing advertisements on its mobile applications until last spring. In the first quarter of this year, the mobile category accounted for 30 percent of total ad revenue.
2 grants to UC Riverside boost scientists' efforts in developing improved cowpea varieties
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
30-Oct-2013
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Contact: Iqbal Pittalwala iqbal@ucr.edu 951-827-6050 University of California - Riverside
Funding from USAID will help increase crop yield in several African countries
RIVERSIDE, Calif. Cowpea is a protein-rich legume crop that plays a key role in sustaining food security for people and their livestock. Immensely important in many parts of the world, particularly drought-prone regions, it plays a central role in the diet and economy of hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia.
To meet the needs of a growing world population, new cowpea varieties with desirable traits, such as higher yield and quality, disease resistance, pest resistance and drought tolerance, are needed. But breeding these new varieties the conventional way crossing one variety with another, based on best guesses is time-consuming and laborious.
Enter DNA marker-assisted breeding, a genetic tool that can greatly accelerate breeding efforts by utilizing genetic "markers" or molecular flags in the plant genome that indicate the location of a particular genetic trait. Breeders use the markers to screen large populations of plants from crosses of different varieties. In effect, the markers help breeders locate genes linked to traits the way road signs help a motorist arrive at a destination.
This month, scientists at the University of California, Riverside received substantial funding by way of two grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to continue their work on developing better yielding varieties of cowpea through new genomic resources and marker-assisted breeding research by which UC Riverside directly impacts cowpea production in several countries in Africa. The grants support USAID's agricultural research and capacity building work under Feed the Future, the U.S. Government's global hunger and food security initiative.
The two grants total nearly $7 million. The first, creating the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Climate-Resilient Cowpea, is a nearly $5 million grant that supports a new five-year cowpea-breeding project with partners in four West African nations: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal. The second grant, titled "Genetic improvement of cowpea to overcome biotic stress and drought constraints," extends a ten-year project and brings additional funding of about $2 million over four-and-a-half years to UCR through the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Grain Legumes as a sub-contract with Michigan State University, East Lansing.
Specific traits of interest for cowpea improvement will include resistance to the drought-associated fungal pathogen Macrophomina phaseolina, tolerance against drought-induced early senescence, and resistance to insects, nematodes and other diseases, along with high yield and maintenance of traits of especial interest to Africa such as seed size, seed coat color and patterns.
"UCR cowpea research goes back more than 30 years," said Timothy Close, a professor of genetics in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences and the principal investigator of the $5 million grant. "The USAID funding through Feed the Future is recognition of the tremendous value that UCR brings to cowpea research and the positive impact it is having on cowpea breeding for African farmers."
Cowpea originated in Africa. It is known also as southern pea, blackeye pea, crowder pea, lubia, niebe, coupe or frijole. In the United States, cowpea is popular in the south, where it is known as blackeyed peas and other names. California primarily grows the blackeyed dry-grain cowpea type.
"Both research projects are intimately tied to our collaborators in sub-Saharan Africa," Close said. "Beyond the technical capability we offer, we have a good network of partners in Africa for on-the-ground application of genetic improvement for cowpea."
Close explained that to breed improved varieties of cowpea, scientists must understand its genetic makeup, mark the location of genes that control important traits, and select the best trait combinations they wish to see emerge in new varieties. Close also explained that with very dense genetic markers it is not crucial to understand exactly which genes underpin the traits, though such information can be helpful for purposes such as finding similar genes within collections of genetically diverse relatives of cultivated cowpeas or even in other plants.
Rather than genetically modify cowpea via manipulation of genes in test tubes, the researchers will use the marker-assisted breeding technology to expedite conventional breeding and, thereby, speed up the production of new and improved cowpea varieties. Associated with traits desired for breeding, the genetic marker profiles of progeny derived from carefully chosen parents will be used to more deliberately design and assemble new superior cowpea varieties.
"We are no longer confined to slower, less directed methods of plant breeding, nor must we base all hope on genetically modified organisms," Close said. "With marker-assisted breeding we can, over just a few years, accomplish improvement in cowpea varieties that can enormously benefit farmers, markets and consumers."
Philip Roberts, a professor of nematology and the principal investigator on the $2 million USAID grant, explained that the marker-assisted breeding technology for cowpea, developed at UCR, is based on finding genetic variability in cowpea that already exists in nature and that can then be brought into breeding programs.
"Our method is focused on finding genetic variability that nature has already created and marking where the genes for the favorable traits are located in the cowpea genome," he said. "The marker-assisted selection then allows for the crossing of varieties with complementary sets of favorable traits so that these traits can be stacked up and passed down to progeny. It's not about making transgenes and inserting them into plants. It's about bringing favorable traits from donors into highly bred cultivars via accelerated cross-breeding."
Close and Roberts will be joined in the analysis by Stefano Lonardi, a professor of computer science and engineering and a co-principal investigator on the team, who will help process large amounts of data that the research projects will generate.
"We will use a computational method that greatly reduces the possibility of making mistakes and also reduces the cost," Lonardi said. "This method makes it possible to mark where in the genome the genes are located that influence, say, drought-tolerance. And the method also identifies those progeny that carry the alleles, which are forms of genes, for this and other desirable traits."
Close explained that marker-assisted breeding can also be understood as being analogous to creating a painting.
"Imagine you have eight different sources of favorable alleles," he said. "You can make a painting by having a blue segment in one section of the canvass for drought adaptation, a yellow one in another section for aphid resistance, and so on. This way, you create what's called a genetic ideotype. You then use markers to cross one variety with another, and calculate how close each progeny is to the ideotype. The goal is to get a variety close to the genetic ideotype through the least number of steps. Because the marker system has good knowledge-based efficiency built into it, it can deliver a cowpea variety that is close to the ideotype in as little as four to five years."
UCR has already had much success in releasing new cowpea varieties in California and West Africa, and has a longterm blackeye breeding program funded by the California Dry Bean Advisory Board.
"The UCR Coachella Valley Agricultural Research Station closely resembles environmental conditions in West Africa," Roberts said. "The lessons learned here in breeding this legacy crop plant have already helped boost yield and consumer adoption in Africa."
UCR is host to a collection of more than 5,000 cowpea accessions from around the world. Researchers at the university, like, most recently, Close and Roberts, have been providing assistance to African scientists for several decades. In the late 1970s, Anthony Hall, a professor emeritus of crop physiology in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, pioneered research on cowpea at UCR. His research on cowpea physiology contributed to a deeper understanding of the legume's adaptation to drought, heat and poor soils; his efforts with several African breeders helped develop highly successful varieties in Senegal, Sudan and Ghana. He also led the effort to establish a genetic map for cowpea, published in 1997.
"The UCR cowpea team has trained many graduate students from Africa at UCR over the years," Close said. "Several of these young and bright scientists have returned to their countries of origin and applied in farms there the knowledge in cowpea genetic research they gained at UCR. As before, in both the Feed the Future projects we will emphasize direct training of African breeders to ensure effective adoption of best practices related to the use of genetic markers."
The research projects will support a number of UCR graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, support staff and visiting scientists in the labs of Close, Roberts and Lonardi.
###
The University of California, Riverside (http://www.ucr.edu) is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment has exceeded 21,000 students. The campus will open a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual statewide economic impact of more than $1 billion. A broadcast studio with fiber cable to the AT&T Hollywood hub is available for live or taped interviews. UCR also has ISDN for radio interviews. To learn more, call (951) UCR-NEWS.
USAID is an independent agency that provides economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the United States. As stated in the President's National Security Strategy, USAID's work in development joins diplomacy and defense as one of three key pieces of the nation's foreign policy apparatus. USAID promotes peace and stability by fostering economic growth, protecting human health, providing emergency humanitarian assistance, and enhancing democracy in developing countries. These efforts to improve the lives of millions of people worldwide represent U.S. values and advance U.S. interests for peace and prosperity.
Feed the Future is the U.S. Government's global hunger and food security initiative. With a focus on smallholder farmers, particularly women, Feed the Future supports partner countries in developing their agriculture sectors to spur economic growth and trade that increase incomes and reduce hunger, poverty and undernutrition.
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2 grants to UC Riverside boost scientists' efforts in developing improved cowpea varieties
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
30-Oct-2013
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Contact: Iqbal Pittalwala iqbal@ucr.edu 951-827-6050 University of California - Riverside
Funding from USAID will help increase crop yield in several African countries
RIVERSIDE, Calif. Cowpea is a protein-rich legume crop that plays a key role in sustaining food security for people and their livestock. Immensely important in many parts of the world, particularly drought-prone regions, it plays a central role in the diet and economy of hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia.
To meet the needs of a growing world population, new cowpea varieties with desirable traits, such as higher yield and quality, disease resistance, pest resistance and drought tolerance, are needed. But breeding these new varieties the conventional way crossing one variety with another, based on best guesses is time-consuming and laborious.
Enter DNA marker-assisted breeding, a genetic tool that can greatly accelerate breeding efforts by utilizing genetic "markers" or molecular flags in the plant genome that indicate the location of a particular genetic trait. Breeders use the markers to screen large populations of plants from crosses of different varieties. In effect, the markers help breeders locate genes linked to traits the way road signs help a motorist arrive at a destination.
This month, scientists at the University of California, Riverside received substantial funding by way of two grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to continue their work on developing better yielding varieties of cowpea through new genomic resources and marker-assisted breeding research by which UC Riverside directly impacts cowpea production in several countries in Africa. The grants support USAID's agricultural research and capacity building work under Feed the Future, the U.S. Government's global hunger and food security initiative.
The two grants total nearly $7 million. The first, creating the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Climate-Resilient Cowpea, is a nearly $5 million grant that supports a new five-year cowpea-breeding project with partners in four West African nations: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal. The second grant, titled "Genetic improvement of cowpea to overcome biotic stress and drought constraints," extends a ten-year project and brings additional funding of about $2 million over four-and-a-half years to UCR through the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Grain Legumes as a sub-contract with Michigan State University, East Lansing.
Specific traits of interest for cowpea improvement will include resistance to the drought-associated fungal pathogen Macrophomina phaseolina, tolerance against drought-induced early senescence, and resistance to insects, nematodes and other diseases, along with high yield and maintenance of traits of especial interest to Africa such as seed size, seed coat color and patterns.
"UCR cowpea research goes back more than 30 years," said Timothy Close, a professor of genetics in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences and the principal investigator of the $5 million grant. "The USAID funding through Feed the Future is recognition of the tremendous value that UCR brings to cowpea research and the positive impact it is having on cowpea breeding for African farmers."
Cowpea originated in Africa. It is known also as southern pea, blackeye pea, crowder pea, lubia, niebe, coupe or frijole. In the United States, cowpea is popular in the south, where it is known as blackeyed peas and other names. California primarily grows the blackeyed dry-grain cowpea type.
"Both research projects are intimately tied to our collaborators in sub-Saharan Africa," Close said. "Beyond the technical capability we offer, we have a good network of partners in Africa for on-the-ground application of genetic improvement for cowpea."
Close explained that to breed improved varieties of cowpea, scientists must understand its genetic makeup, mark the location of genes that control important traits, and select the best trait combinations they wish to see emerge in new varieties. Close also explained that with very dense genetic markers it is not crucial to understand exactly which genes underpin the traits, though such information can be helpful for purposes such as finding similar genes within collections of genetically diverse relatives of cultivated cowpeas or even in other plants.
Rather than genetically modify cowpea via manipulation of genes in test tubes, the researchers will use the marker-assisted breeding technology to expedite conventional breeding and, thereby, speed up the production of new and improved cowpea varieties. Associated with traits desired for breeding, the genetic marker profiles of progeny derived from carefully chosen parents will be used to more deliberately design and assemble new superior cowpea varieties.
"We are no longer confined to slower, less directed methods of plant breeding, nor must we base all hope on genetically modified organisms," Close said. "With marker-assisted breeding we can, over just a few years, accomplish improvement in cowpea varieties that can enormously benefit farmers, markets and consumers."
Philip Roberts, a professor of nematology and the principal investigator on the $2 million USAID grant, explained that the marker-assisted breeding technology for cowpea, developed at UCR, is based on finding genetic variability in cowpea that already exists in nature and that can then be brought into breeding programs.
"Our method is focused on finding genetic variability that nature has already created and marking where the genes for the favorable traits are located in the cowpea genome," he said. "The marker-assisted selection then allows for the crossing of varieties with complementary sets of favorable traits so that these traits can be stacked up and passed down to progeny. It's not about making transgenes and inserting them into plants. It's about bringing favorable traits from donors into highly bred cultivars via accelerated cross-breeding."
Close and Roberts will be joined in the analysis by Stefano Lonardi, a professor of computer science and engineering and a co-principal investigator on the team, who will help process large amounts of data that the research projects will generate.
"We will use a computational method that greatly reduces the possibility of making mistakes and also reduces the cost," Lonardi said. "This method makes it possible to mark where in the genome the genes are located that influence, say, drought-tolerance. And the method also identifies those progeny that carry the alleles, which are forms of genes, for this and other desirable traits."
Close explained that marker-assisted breeding can also be understood as being analogous to creating a painting.
"Imagine you have eight different sources of favorable alleles," he said. "You can make a painting by having a blue segment in one section of the canvass for drought adaptation, a yellow one in another section for aphid resistance, and so on. This way, you create what's called a genetic ideotype. You then use markers to cross one variety with another, and calculate how close each progeny is to the ideotype. The goal is to get a variety close to the genetic ideotype through the least number of steps. Because the marker system has good knowledge-based efficiency built into it, it can deliver a cowpea variety that is close to the ideotype in as little as four to five years."
UCR has already had much success in releasing new cowpea varieties in California and West Africa, and has a longterm blackeye breeding program funded by the California Dry Bean Advisory Board.
"The UCR Coachella Valley Agricultural Research Station closely resembles environmental conditions in West Africa," Roberts said. "The lessons learned here in breeding this legacy crop plant have already helped boost yield and consumer adoption in Africa."
UCR is host to a collection of more than 5,000 cowpea accessions from around the world. Researchers at the university, like, most recently, Close and Roberts, have been providing assistance to African scientists for several decades. In the late 1970s, Anthony Hall, a professor emeritus of crop physiology in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, pioneered research on cowpea at UCR. His research on cowpea physiology contributed to a deeper understanding of the legume's adaptation to drought, heat and poor soils; his efforts with several African breeders helped develop highly successful varieties in Senegal, Sudan and Ghana. He also led the effort to establish a genetic map for cowpea, published in 1997.
"The UCR cowpea team has trained many graduate students from Africa at UCR over the years," Close said. "Several of these young and bright scientists have returned to their countries of origin and applied in farms there the knowledge in cowpea genetic research they gained at UCR. As before, in both the Feed the Future projects we will emphasize direct training of African breeders to ensure effective adoption of best practices related to the use of genetic markers."
The research projects will support a number of UCR graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, support staff and visiting scientists in the labs of Close, Roberts and Lonardi.
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The University of California, Riverside (http://www.ucr.edu) is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment has exceeded 21,000 students. The campus will open a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual statewide economic impact of more than $1 billion. A broadcast studio with fiber cable to the AT&T Hollywood hub is available for live or taped interviews. UCR also has ISDN for radio interviews. To learn more, call (951) UCR-NEWS.
USAID is an independent agency that provides economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the United States. As stated in the President's National Security Strategy, USAID's work in development joins diplomacy and defense as one of three key pieces of the nation's foreign policy apparatus. USAID promotes peace and stability by fostering economic growth, protecting human health, providing emergency humanitarian assistance, and enhancing democracy in developing countries. These efforts to improve the lives of millions of people worldwide represent U.S. values and advance U.S. interests for peace and prosperity.
Feed the Future is the U.S. Government's global hunger and food security initiative. With a focus on smallholder farmers, particularly women, Feed the Future supports partner countries in developing their agriculture sectors to spur economic growth and trade that increase incomes and reduce hunger, poverty and undernutrition.
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