In her youth, Tunisian Manel Othmeni developed an interest in interacting with plants, a fascination that later grew into a passion for wheat research.

A training course on developing stress-resilient maize for early-/mid-career maize breeders from national programs, agricultural universities and seed companies, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs), was held at CIMMYT-Hyderabad, India, on 15 May 2015. The course was open to partners in the Heat Tolerant Maize for Asia (HTMA) project and members of the International Maize Improvement Consortium (IMIC-Asia). It covered key aspects of precision phenotyping, including enhancing precision of field trials, managing adequate levels of stress to express available genotypic variability, using advanced tools to capture data efficiently and precision in recording various traits in phenotyping trials.

The Wheat Productivity Enhancement Program (WPEP) in Pakistan, led by CIMMYT and funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), is working to enhance and protect wheat productivity in Pakistan by supporting research leading to the identification, adoption and optimal agronomic management of new, high yielding, disease resistant wheat varieties.

The international training workshop “Approaches for integrated analysis of agricultural systems in South Asia: Field, to farm, to landscape scale,” jointly organized by CIMMYT and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR)-Central Soil Salinity Research Institute (CSSRI), was held at Karnal, Haryana, India, during 18-23 May. The workshop targeted farming systems and agricultural development researchers in South Asia and provided an overview of the approaches and tools used to assess agricultural systems.

The Nutritious Maize for Ethiopia (NuME) project recently organized a three-day training workshop on quality protein maize (QPM) seed production and quality control, as part of the project’s activities to enhance QPM seed production.