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HomePosts Tagged "GM mustard hybrid DMH 11"
Agri Genomics, Agrotech, India, Industry Reports / Analysis, R&D

The application of molecular biology and genomics to farming, known as agrigenomics, has the potential to significantly transform India’s agrarian landscape. It has the potential to revolutionise agriculture by enhancing yield, expanding food variety, improving nutrition, creating disease and pest resilience, reducing food waste, and promoting sustainable farming practices. The ‘Genome-Editing’ technology is currently under scrutiny as AgroSpectrum examines its impact on the agriculture industry in general, with a particular focus on the future of India’s agriculture sector.

The application of molecular biology and genomics to farming, known as agrigenomics, has the potential to significantly transform India’s agrarian landscape. India is one of the world’s largest consumers of food, with a population of over 1.3 billion, and the agricultural industry employs over half of the country’s workforce. However, Indian farmers face various challenges, including pests, diseases, unpredictable weather fronts and the need to increase yields to feed a growing population. Agrigenomics offers potential solutions to these problems, but its implementation has been slow in India.

CRISPR/Cas9, also known as the ‘genetic scissors’, was recently discovered by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. This technology allows scientists to make precise modifications to the DNA of various organisms, including plants, animals, and microbes. It has the potential to revolutionise agriculture by enhancing yield, expanding food variety, improving nutrition, creating disease and pest resilience, reducing food waste, and promoting sustainable farming practices. The ‘Genome-Editing’ technology is currently under scrutiny as AgroSpectrum examines its impact on the agriculture industry in general, with a particular focus on the future of India’s agriculture sector.

Biotech crops, also known as GMOs (genetically modified organisms) or GEOs (genetically engineered organisms), have been developed through the commercial application of genetic engineering technology since 1996. These crops have been engineered to possess a wide range of desirable characteristics, including resistance to pests and diseases, tolerance of herbicides, tolerance of extremes of moisture and salt, increased yields, improved nutrient content, and increased storage stability, among others. While only Bt cotton has been cultivated for the last 20 years, other biotech crops, such as Bt brinjal, GM mustard, and herbicide-tolerant Bt cotton, have been approved by government scientific committees but have not been commercialised in India. All of the major scientific organisations, including the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS), endorse GM technologies.

Genetic crop improvement and improvements in natural resource management have led to a tenfold increase in food grain output over the last hundred years. The earliest breeding method practised by ancient farmers and plant breeders was selecting superior plant types from the natural variation created by spontaneous mutations that generated novel alleles of the genes, as well as recombination of alleles from different genes in the genome. However, as science and technology have progressed, plant hybridisation techniques have also advanced.

“One just needs to look at the history of Bt-cotton to see the impact of the modification in terms of improved yield and greatly decreased use of pesticides. One can expect similar improvements in other GM crops. The preliminary data for mustard appears to show significant yield improvements (almost 40 per cent). This kind of improvement will be very important for farmers,” stated Sir Richard John Roberts, a British Biochemist and Molecular Biologist, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for his discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing.

To read more click on : https://agrospectrumindia.com/e-magazine

The application of molecular biology and genomics

Agri Genomics, India, R&D

Prof. K C Bansal, Secretary, National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, New Delhi, and Former Director, National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (ICAR), New Delhi

For a country like India, ensuring sustainable food security in a rapidly changing climate is a significant concern today. With the slow pace of yield increase, it is crucial to accelerate the genetic improvement of crops for enhancing food production and achieving self-sufficiency. The rapid adoption of science-based technologies for crop improvement, such as GM crops and gene-edited crops are likely to play major roles.

Science-based advancements of breeding technologies continue to dominate global agriculture, playing a crucial role in increasing food production. While conventional plant breeding has historically made significant contributions and continues to do so, plant genetic engineering has emerged as a powerful modern tool for crop improvement. Since 1996, several genetically modified (GM) crops with improved traits have been developed, and they have been widely adopted globally. Currently, they are grown in over 190 million hectares across 30 countries, including India. This makes plant genetic engineering the fastest-adopted technology in the history of modern agriculture. Furthermore, GM crops and their derived products have been used as food or feed in more than 70 countries over the last 25 years, demonstrating their safety to humans, animals and the environment.

In India, Bt cotton was the first GM crop to be commercialised in 2002, and its impact has been viewed as a great success story globally. Two decades later, in 2022, GM mustard hybrid DMH-11 and its parental lines were environmentally released in India, and genome editing was exempted in plants from biosafety assessment for crop improvement. These two modern science-based developments occurred in the interest of farmers and the national economy.

GM Mustard

In the mid-1960s, India experienced a Green Revolution that resulted in a significant increase in food production, from 50 million tonnes in 1950-51 to over 300 million tonnes in 2020-21. However, this progress was not replicated with any oilseed crop, which is urgently needed to meet our growing demands. Due to a serious deficit in domestic edible oil production, we heavily rely on imported edible oils.  In 2020-21, India imported 13.35 million tonnes of edible oils at a cost of around Rs 117,000 crore. Nevertheless, the approval for the environmental release of GM mustard hybrid DMH 11, developed by a public sector institution in India, with approximately 28-30 per cent higher yield, is a significant step towards reducing our dependence on imports. 

Mustard is predominantly a self-pollinating crop, making it difficult to develop high-yielding hybrids by crossing two diverse parental lines. To facilitate cross-pollination, a robust system has been developed in India using two transgenes: the barnase gene for male sterility (MS) and the barstar gene for the restoration of male fertility (RF). Hybrid seeds are produced by crossing the MS and RF lines. This two-gene system is also used worldwide in rapeseed, a sister crop of mustard, to develop GM hybrids that farmers grow on a large scale for higher yields.

To read more click on : https://agrospectrumindia.com/e-magazine

Prof. K C Bansal, Secretary, National Academy