Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Thursday, Apr 18, 2002
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Thursday, Apr 18, 2002 |
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Agri-Biz & Commodities
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Research & Development Research on to develop drought-tolerant rice Our Bureau
HYDERABAD, April 17 FIVE institutions and 20 scientists are currently engaged in the development of aerobic rice varieties that do not need continuous irrigation of fields. The Rs 4-crore research project is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation of the US. The institutions involved are the Tamil Nadu Agriculture University, University of Agricultural Sciences of Bangalore, Indira Gandhi Agricultural University of Raipur, Acharya Narendra Dev University of Agriculture and Technology of Faizlabad, International Crops Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics and the University of Hyderabad. According to the project coordinator, Prof A.R. Reddy, the research team is confident of identifying drought-tolerant associated genes in the next three years. So far, 3000 genes have been identified out of which 800 genes were already placed on the rice chromosomes. Prof Reddy told newspersons that for developing drought-resistant rice varieties, a thorough understanding of the genes that govern the plant's architecture and responses to drought stress was needed. Once these genes were identified, they could be localised on the chromosomes, their functions defined and could be manipulated and deployed in breeding for drought tolerant rice. He said his laboratory at the Department of Plant Sciences in University of Hyderabad was adapting strategies using molecular and genomic technologies to elucidate the role of genes in drought tolerance property in rice. Currently, 10 parental lines of rice were being evaluated. Recently, Prof Reddy's research group had unravelled the codes of more than 20,000 clones of rice genome from drought stress leaves. Of these, 2,500 clones were sequenced and deposited in GeneBank for global usage. Usage of such a large quantity of water is not only costly but also impose great burden on soils and ecology.
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