Thesis subject

The black pages of colonial history investigated through the genomic analysis of African rice

Suriname is home to a large community of Maroons, who descend from enslaved Africans who escaped the plantations during colonial times. The Maroons have many traditions that connect them to Africa. An important one for their survival is their long traditional farming history of African (black) rice, Oryza glaberrima. These African rice varieties were carried overseas by slave ships during colonial times.

Start date

01/05/2024

End date

30/11/2024

The objective of this project is to trace the geographical origin of the African rice varieties that are grown by the Maroons, using population genomics approaches.

You will:

Analyse the population genomic structure of African (black) rice varieties with various clustering methods (e.g.: principal component analysis, ADMIXTURE).
Compare the genomic ancestry of the African rice varieties from Maroon communities in Suriname to varieties in Africa to find the closest genomic relatives with Patterson F-statistics.
Interpret and modify bash scripts bash for running genomic analyses, and R scripts for plotting figures (please bring some knowledge and/or a lot of motivation to learn this).