My hope was that I would be able to drum up a bunch of collaborative efforts to study the diversity in the moringa germplasm collection. The point of the talk that I gave was that with modern communication technology, to say nothing of the ability to travel so easily, it is time for moringa research to become global. What I mean by global is that it is time to survey the full genetic diversity across Moringa oleifera and the genus at large and time to stop carrying out local little studies of whatever moringa material happens to be growing outside the lab. This is just what the International Moringa Germplasm Collection is designed to do. Now that the plants are big enough to harvest plenty of leaves from, it's time to use them to their full potential. Let's do it, was the invitation of my talk.
And in response I got... virtually nothing. I got two requests of the "please send me all of your 20 years of work no strings attached and for no real reason" type, but no interest in producing high quality moringa science for publication in reputable journals. To be fair, a lot of the people attending the meeting were not scientists but farmers and people interested in commercializing Moringa, but still I expected at least some scientific discussion.
So, let me reiterate my invitation: please, let's use the material in the Collection to drive moringa research with a truly global scope and relevance. Let's publish moringa research in the best journals we can, to bring moringa out of its regional-journals-with-low-or-no-impact-factor obscurity and into the mainstream. Get in touch, let's design a study, and I can send you material immediately!
In the meantime, here are a few photos from the meeting...