Two banana specialists working under the supervision of Bioversity scientists have received Borlaug LEAP Fellowships awarded by the USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service to developing country researchers.

Enoch Thaddaeus Quayson, a food scientist from Ghana, is looking at how the different ways of cooking plantains affect the availability of carotenoids, which the body transforms into Vitamin A, a micronutrient vital for good health. He will do part of his work at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium under the supervision of Mark Davey and Rony Swennen, a Bioversity Honorary Research Fellow.

At the other end of the continent, Margaret Onyango of Kenya is sorting out the classification of two groups of dessert bananas, Apple and Muraru, to ensure that farmers and breeders make the most of their diversity. She will be helped by Deborah Karamura of the Bioversity office in Uganda, the taxonomist who used morphological characters to untangle the classification of a group of bananas indigenous to the highlands of East Africa. Onyango will be using both morphological and molecular characters to support her findings.

The Fellowships are named after Norman E. Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution. Details of the LEAP Fellowships are available from the University of California, Davis.