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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

Erick Boy

researcher spotlight

Erick Boy

Erick Boy is the Chief Nutritionist in the HarvestPlus section of the Innovation Policy and Scaling Unit. As head of nutrition for the HarvestPlus Program since 2008, he has led research that has generated scientific evidence on biofortified staple crops as efficacious and effective interventions to help address iron, vitamin A, and zinc deficiency in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia.

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Since 1975, IFPRI’s research has been informing policies and development programs to improve food security, nutrition, and livelihoods around the world.

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IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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partnerships

The University of Georgia is dedicated to creating a dependable food supply and advancing economic growth. The College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences (CAES) works to support Georgia’s food and fiber industry, as well as working around the world and nationwide through partnerships with international organizations. CAES is home to centers working with plant breeding and genomics, food quality, and more.

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Publications

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Journal Article

Land Reform and Child Health in the Kyrgyz Republic

2024Kosec, Katrina; Shemyakina, Olga N.
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Land Reform and Child Health in the Kyrgyz Republic

Can the establishment of private property rights to land improve child health and nutrition outcomes? We exploit a natural experiment in the Kyrgyz Republic following the collapse of socialism, whereby the government rapidly liquidated state and collective farms containing 75 percent of agricultural land and distributed it to individuals, providing 99-year transferable use rights. We use household surveys collected before, during, and after the privatization reform and spatial variation in its timing to identify its health and nutrition impacts. We find that young children aged 0-5 exposed to land privatization for longer periods of time accumulated significantly greater gains in height- and weight- for-age z-scores, both critical measures of long-term child health and nutrition. Health improvements appear to be driven by increases in consumption of home-produced food rather than increased income from sale of production, likely due to under-developed markets. We find minimal impacts on urban-dwelling children affected only indirectly by the reform.

Year published

2024

Authors

Kosec, Katrina; Shemyakina, Olga N.

Citation

Kosec, Katrina; and Shemyakina, Olga. 2024. Land reform and child health in the Kyrgyz Republic. Economic Development and Cultural Change 72(2). https://doi.org/10.1086/719463

Country/Region

Kyrgyzstan

Keywords

Asia; Central Asia; Land Reform; Health; Children; Nutrition; Privatization; Land Tenure; Child Nutrition; Child Health; Capacity Development

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1086/719463 Source record

Project

Fragility, Conflict, and Migration

Record type

Journal Article

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Journal Article

Leveraging prior biological knowledge improves prediction of tocochromanols in maize grain

2023
Tanaka, Ryokei; Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Wood, Joshua C.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; Bornowski, Nolan; Hamilton, John P.; Vaillancourt, Brieanne; Li, Xianran
…more Deason, Nicholas T.; Schoenbaum, Gregory R.; C. Buell, Robin; DellaPenna, Dean; Yu, Jianming; Gore, Michael A.
Details

Leveraging prior biological knowledge improves prediction of tocochromanols in maize grain

With an essential role in human health, tocochromanols are mostly obtained by consuming seed oils; however, the vitamin E content of the most abundant tocochromanols in maize (Zea mays L.) grain is low. Several large-effect genes with cis-acting variants affecting messenger RNA (mRNA) expression are mostly responsible for tocochromanol variation in maize grain, with other relevant associated quantitative trait loci (QTL) yet to be fully resolved. Leveraging existing genomic and transcriptomic information for maize inbreds could improve prediction when selecting for higher vitamin E content. Here, we first evaluated a multikernel genomic best linear unbiased prediction (MK-GBLUP) approach for modeling known QTL in the prediction of nine tocochromanol grain phenotypes (12–21 QTL per trait) within and between two panels of 1,462 and 242 maize inbred lines. On average, MK-GBLUP models improved predictive abilities by 7.0–13.6% when compared with GBLUP. In a second approach with a subset of 545 lines from the larger panel, the highest average improvement in predictive ability relative to GBLUP was achieved with a multi-trait GBLUP model (15.4%) that had a tocochromanol phenotype and transcript abundances in developing grain for a few large-effect candidate causal genes (1–3 genes per trait) as multiple response variables. Taken together, our study illustrates the enhancement of prediction models when informed by existing biological knowledge pertaining to QTL and candidate causal genes.

Year published

2023

Authors

Tanaka, Ryokei; Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Wood, Joshua C.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; Bornowski, Nolan; Hamilton, John P.; Vaillancourt, Brieanne; Li, Xianran; Deason, Nicholas T.; Schoenbaum, Gregory R.; C. Buell, Robin; DellaPenna, Dean; Yu, Jianming; Gore, Michael A.

Citation

Tanaka, Ryokei; Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Wood, Joshua C.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; et al. 2023. Leveraging prior biological knowledge improves prediction of tocochromanols in maize grain. Plant Genome 16(4): e20276. https://doi.org/10.1002/tpg2.20276

Keywords

Maize; Health; Vitamin E; Genetics; Antioxidants; Quantitative Trait Loci; Gene Expression; Transcriptomics

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1002/tpg2.20276 Source record

Record type

Journal Article

Resource thumbnail

Journal Article

Combining GWAS and TWAS to identify candidate causal genes for tocochromanol levels in maize grain

2022
Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tanaka, Ryokei; Wood, Joshua C.; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; Bornowski, Nolan; Hamilton, John P.; Vaillancourt, Brieanne; Diepenbrock, Christine H.
…more Li, Xianran; Deason, Nicholas T.; Schoenbaum, Gregory R.; Yu, Jianming; Buell, C. Robin; DellaPenna, Dean; Gore, Michael A.
Details

Combining GWAS and TWAS to identify candidate causal genes for tocochromanol levels in maize grain

Tocochromanols (tocopherols and tocotrienols, collectively vitamin E) are lipid-soluble antioxidants important for both plant fitness and human health. The main dietary sources of vitamin E are seed oils that often accumulate high levels of tocopherol isoforms with lower vitamin E activity. The tocochromanol biosynthetic pathway is conserved across plant species but an integrated view of the genes and mechanisms underlying natural variation of tocochromanol levels in seed of most cereal crops remains limited. To address this issue, we utilized the high mapping resolution of the maize Ames panel of ∼1,500 inbred lines scored with 12.2 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms to generate metabolomic (mature grain tocochromanols) and transcriptomic (developing grain) data sets for genetic mapping. By combining results from genome- and transcriptome-wide association studies, we identified a total of 13 candidate causal gene loci, including 5 that had not been previously associated with maize grain tocochromanols: 4 biosynthetic genes (arodeH2 paralog, dxs1, vte5, and vte7) and a plastid S-adenosyl methionine transporter (samt1). Expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) mapping of these 13 gene loci revealed that they are predominantly regulated by cis-eQTL. Through a joint statistical analysis, we implicated cis-acting variants as responsible for colocalized eQTL and GWAS association signals. Our multiomics approach provided increased statistical power and mapping resolution to enable a detailed characterization of the genetic and regulatory architecture underlying tocochromanol accumulation in maize grain and provided insights for ongoing biofortification efforts to breed and/or engineer vitamin E and antioxidant levels in maize and other cereals.

Year published

2022

Authors

Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tanaka, Ryokei; Wood, Joshua C.; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; Bornowski, Nolan; Hamilton, John P.; Vaillancourt, Brieanne; Diepenbrock, Christine H.; Li, Xianran; Deason, Nicholas T.; Schoenbaum, Gregory R.; Yu, Jianming; Buell, C. Robin; DellaPenna, Dean; Gore, Michael A.

Citation

Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tanaka, Ryokei; Wood, Joshua C.; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; et al. 2022. Combining GWAS and TWAS to identify candidate causal genes for tocochromanol levels in maize grain. Genetics 221(4): iyac091. https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyac091

Keywords

Maize; Health; Genes; Biofortification; Vitamin E

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Journal Article