Kassaye Negash

Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research | EIAR · Department of Plant Biotechnology

Domesticated species are impacted in unintended ways during domestication and breeding. Changes in the nature and intensity of selection impart genetic drift, reduce diversity, and increase the frequency of deleterious alleles. Such outcomes constrain our ability to expand the cultivation of crops into environments that differ from those under whic...

Understanding the origins of variation in agricultural pathogens is of fundamental interest and practical importance, especially for diseases that threaten food security. Fusarium oxysporum is among the most important of soil-borne pathogens, with a global distribution and an extensive host range. The pathogen is considered to be asexual, with...

A major agronomic challenge for chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) production is temperatures above 35 °C, which causes reduced fertility and seed development. This study was aimed at assessing the phenotypic variation of chickpea genotypes under variable heat stress conditions. Chickpea genotypes were grown in heat‐stressed locations in both Ethiopia a...

Common beans are important sources of food and cash in Ethiopia. Access to seed of improved bean varieties is the major bottleneck to common bean production. Most of the bean producers obtain seed of improved varieties from few seed suppliers, who are unable to sufficiently produce and sell seed at reasonable price. To improve the accessibility and...

Domesticated species are impacted in unintended ways during domestication and breeding. Changes in the nature and intensity of selection impart genetic drift, reduce diversity and increase the frequency of deleterious alleles. Such outcomes constrain our ability to expand the cultivation of crops into environments that differ from those under which...

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) contributes to food and nutrition security, and income generation for smallholder farmers and enhances foreign exchange earnings in Ethiopia. The crop is one of the major pulses that serve as a rotational crop in cereal based cropping systems in the lowland areas. However, the gap between the potential and nation...

The Vavilov Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (VIR), in St. Petersburg, Russia, houses a unique genebank, with historical collections of landraces. When they were collected, the geographical distribution and genetic diversity of most crops closely reflected their historical patterns of cultivation established over the preceding millennia. We emp...

The common bean research program in Ethiopia aims at contributing to the improvement of the livelihoods of smallholder farmers through generation and promotion of improved demand driven and climate-smart common bean based technologies and information thereby enhancing foreign currency earnings of the country. To achieve these goals, the breeding pr...

In Ethiopia, common bean breeding has been done through introduction of advanced germplasm form the CIAT and local cross making and evaluating the genotypes across years and locations. Through PABRA, bean varieties with known market attributes have also been imported and went through fast tracked evaluation and best ones released. In situ populatio...

Common bean variety selection within its production environment is often challenged by the occurrence of significant genotype-by-environment interactions (GEI) in the variety development process. Grain yield performance of 16 navy bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) lines was tested in a multi-environment variety trial during 2010 and 2011 main growing se...

When genotypes are introduced into a new and diverse production environments, occurrence of significant genotype by environment interaction (GEI) complicates selection of stable genotypes. Therefore, fifteen introduced and one check small red common bean lines were evaluated at five representative dry bean growing locations of Ethiopia for seed yie...

In spite of the availability of several improved agricultural technologies generated by the research system in Ethiopia over the last four decades, adoption of these innovations by smallholder farmers has been very low. This has led to stagnation of agricultural productivity and low crop yields, exposing the country to recurrent food shortfalls and...