02 Oct 2019

Building for the future - biodiversity in Nigerian palm wine fermentation

Chioma Amadiâs knowledge exchange was funded by the AMI International Capacity Building Fund. This grant provides resources for training and education in microbiology in developing countries. Chioma gives us a quick report and tells us how they used this fund.

I am writing to let AMI know that based on their approval of the international building capacity grant, I have made the visit to Dr Jonas Warringer laboratory in Sweden. After an unfortunate delay in visa processing, I arrived in Dr Warringer’s Lab, in the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden on 16th November 2017 and stayed with them until 29th March 2018 when I departed for Nigeria.

I visited with 840 collection of Nigerian palm wine yeast strains from all over Nigeria. We were hoping to better understand the diversity of these strains, so at the laboratory the isolates were genetically characterized using a technique that examines restriction fragment length polymorphism of the ITS region. We also used multiplex PCR to confirm the species identity of S. cerevisae and non-S. cerevisae strains. Furthermore, we measured the doubling time and yield of each of the 840 yeast isolates in the collection in about 100 environments using ultra-high throughput growth phenotyping.

All of this data is being analysed to be put into a publication that comprehensively describes the genetic and phenotypic diversity of Nigerian-wine yeast stains.

Chioma Amadi

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