BY Prof. K C Bansal Sr. Fellow, TERI-Deakin Nano-Biotechnology Centre, The Energy Resource Institute (TERI)
Ever since the domestication of plants 10,000 years ago, the use of plant genetic resources by breeders in crop breeding programmes has led to the development of crop varieties that have contributed globally towards increased food production. These genetic resources for food and agriculture, however, need to be continually utilised for not only enhancing the food production but also for developing nutritionally rich and climate resilient food crops to meet the demand of the projected 10 billion people by 2050. The importance of plant genetic resources has increased significantly in the recent years in the wake of sustainability of agricultural production in a changing climate regime and with the advent of genomics and genome editing tools.
India is a biodiversity rich country and is endowed with vast biological resources in 3 out of 34 global biodiversity hotspots located here. Also, the 2nd largest gene bank of the world with 0.45 million accessions of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture is located in India. However, concerted efforts are needed to unlock this huge genetic potential by phenotyping and evaluating the entire collections of different crops in a systematic fashion as earlier demonstrated in case of wheat and chickpea.
With the availability of increasing number of crop genome sequences and the tools of computational biology, it has become feasible to identify genes and alleles, which remained otherwise hidden in the diverse crop accessions in a gene bank. The crop genomics is facilitating continuously to help us gain insights into the deeper understanding of the functional diversity present in millions of crop germplasm collections.
More recently, the CRISPR-cas based genome editing system has given rise to a novel platform for adding new genetic traits or combinations needed to further improve the existing high yielding crops with features like climate resilience, disease resistance, nutritional enrichment and efficient utilization of natural resources.
Hence, it is now the time to combine conventional plant breeding with precision phenotyping, genomics and genome-based editing tools for heralding a new sustainable food production system keeping in view the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs-2030).
