The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) believes that open access contributes to its mission of reducing hunger and poverty, and improving human nutrition in the tropics through research aimed at increasing the eco-efficiency of agriculture.CIAT is committed to creating and sharing knowledge and information openly and globally. We do this through collaborative research as well as through the open sharing of our data, tools, and publications. Citation:Odogwu, Blessing A.; Nkalubo, Stanley T.; Mukankusi, Clare; Odong, Thomas; Awale, Halima E.; Rubaihayo, Patrick; Kelly, James D.. 2017. Phenotypic and genotypic screening for rust resistance in common bean germplasm in Uganda. Euphytica. 213: 49.Publisher's DOI: https://dx.Abstract 5 Rust caused by Uromyces appendiculatus (Pers., Pers.) Unger is one of the major foliar diseases 6 of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) in Uganda. The use of host resistance remains the best 7 option in managing this disease. The objective of this study was to identify sources of broad-8 spectrum rust resistance in common bean germplasm including landraces, commercial and 9 introduced genotypes using a combination of phenotypic and genotypic screening with 22 simple 10 sequence repeats (SSRs) markers located on chromosome Pv04. A total of 138 cultivars were field 11 screened from 2014 and 2015 using alpha lattice design. The variance and correlation of disease 12 incidence, area under the disease progression curve (AUDPC) and total grain yield were computed 13 using GenStat. The polymorphism information content of the cultivars was determined, and the 14 association of the markers and the disease resistance traits were analyzed using PowerMarker and 15 TASSEL respectively. Resistance of each cultivar was compared to the presence and absence of 16amplified markers. There were highly significant differences (P < 0.001) among the cultivars for 17 disease incidence, AUDPC and total grain yield and a strong correlation (P < 0.001) between 18 disease incidence and AUDPC in both years. The SSR markers, BARC_PV_SSR04725, 19 bean_ssr_0778 and bean_ssr_2892 were observed to be associated (P ≤0.05) with rust resistance. 20The two screening methods identified 15 cultivars which included local cultivars, Nabufumbo, Kapchorwa white, and NABE 2 as new sources of rust resistance. This study identified sources of 1 rust resistance that would be useful in the bean breeding programmes in Uganda. 2

Cowpea (Vigna unguiculataL.Walp) is an important food security crop. It provides food and income for many small-holder farmers in Africa. As a food source, the grains contain large quantities of protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, and fiber. In spite of the high nutritional value of cowpea, the crop is underutilized in most households and commercial eating houses in Nigeria. Several factors have been reported as constraints affecting the consumption and utilization of the crop in Nigeria, but have not been documented. This research was conducted to identify the factors affecting the utilization of the crop and determine the stakeholders’ preferences that will increase the demand and consumption of cowpea grains in Nigeria. The study was carried out in Ibadan in Oyo State and Zaria in Kaduna State in Nigeria,with a total of 318 respondents. A descriptive research design was used to collect data which were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) IBM version 20 and Microsoft Excel spread sheet. From the social demography result, the respondents were from six different category of stakeholders in the cowpea value chain mainly from breeders (3.7%), farmers (36.0%), marketers (12.7%), food vendors (6.7%), nutritionists (2.6%) and consumers (38.9%). This implies that the respondents were knowledgeable about the factors affecting the cowpea utilization. The two factors identified to affect the utilization of cowpea were culinary qualities (63.0% of respondents) and removing dirt (37.0% of respondents). Among the culinary qualities, the major quality preferred was reducing the cooking time (42.9% of respondents), followed by improved taste (31.7% of respondents), and value added products such as cowpea in powdered form (19.0% of respondents), and canned cowpea (6.4% of respondents). A total of 47.2% of respondents preferred the duration for cooking cowpea for21-30 minutes as against the 40-60 minutes most cowpea varieties cook for. These findings indicate that cooking time is still the major factor affecting the utilizationof cowpea grains. Therefore, improving this quality and other utilization attributes will increase the demand and consumption of cowpea grains.

Weeds represent one of the major biological constraints to upland rice production in low input agricultural systems. The effects of weeding regimes and rice cultivars on weed growth and rice yield were investigated over three seasons. Four weeding regimes [0 (no weeding control), 1, 2, and 3] and three popular rice varieties (NARIC 2, a local cultivar, and NERICA 4), were tested in 4x3 factorial experiment in a Randomised Complete block with three replicates. The most important weed species recorded were; Biden pilosa, Commelina benghalensis L., Euphorbia hirta L., Micrococca mercurialis Benth., Galisonga parviflora Cav, Sida rhombifolia L., Triumfeta spp, Guizotia scabra, Celocia trigyna, Cyprus rotundus, Panicum Maximum Jacq, and Imperata cylindrica L. Across cultivars, the best weeding regimes for weed control and rice yields were single weeding and weeding twice. Differences among interaction effects between variety and weeding regime were not significant for most traits, except ripening ratio and grain yield in experiment one and experiment two. Across weeding regimes, NERICA 4 out yielded the other varieties in all the three experiments. However, a single well timed hand hoe weeding, together with the use of a cultivar with good adaptation to unfavourable rice growing conditions, such as NERICA 4, would increase land and labour productivity of upland rice-based systems in Uganda.

The need to tackle the discrepancy between research outputs and the execution of the findings into real practice is a crucial factor in establishing evidence-based practice in a selected government agency. There is a need to increase the number of experts in our education sector who can synthesise, translate, and package the evidence for ready use by decision-makers and to foster entrepreneurship in Africa. To achieve this, the activities of a 28-man Evidence Leaders in Africa (ELA) team were recruited to drive the project through capacity building training and workshop sessions. Thereafter, a non-random purposive sampling technique targeted at policy makers at various government and non-governmental organizations was adopted as the study design. In all, purposive administration of 424 copies of questionnaire to individuals in different governmental and non-governmental organizations was done by the recruited personnel. The retrieved data from the questionnaire were analyzed using standard statistical method. Socio-demographic characteristics of respondents reveal 34% representation of (31-40 years) age bracket, with (57%) of them working in the University spanning over 2 to 5years (47%) work experience. Approximately 64% of the respondents are not aware of EIDM while 71% had no understanding of EIDM. As regards knowledge of EIDM, 36% had no knowledge of EIDM, 29% had moderate knowledge, 34% were beginners while approximately 1% had advanced knowledge of EIDM. Also, approximately 99% of the respondents have neither been trained nor involved in training others in EIDM. It was also observed that 8.5% of the respondents were policy-makers in the organization, yet 90.7% of the respondents agree that EIDM is useful in policy-making while 81.3% of the respondents engage their colleagues in EIDM. From this study, it is safe to infer that institutionalizing EIDM in NNMDA has numerous benefits as shown by the findings of this study. This will only be possible when all parties involved in producing and using research evidence are well informed and knowledgeable in EIDM.