Exciting Times for Cowpea Genetic Transformation Research

Cowpea represents a major food crop for the poor in Asia and especially in Africa. However, its production is constrained principally by insect pests as well as diseases. Attempts to improve cowpea insect resistance have not yielded significant result till date. This paper reviews biotechnological approaches that have been employed to transfer foreign genes into cowpea with a view to conferring desirable traits on it. The recent advances made in generating cowpea transformants with stable inheritance of trangenes by the progenies heralds exciting times for the genetic transformation research on this erstwhile recalcitrant food crop. As such, this genetic transformation approach could be used to transfer insect resistance traits to the crop species