Buying hybrid seeds may become history

Can you imagine farmers working with hybrid seeds not having to buy them every year? Instead, they can clone the seeds on the fields! Seed companies can reduce production costs and bring down time-cycles significantly.

All this could be possible in future, if findings of a collaborative research project involving scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and reputed laboratories abroad could be taken further.

The “path-breaking” discovery, which has been published in today's issue of the journal Science , entitled “Synthetic clonal reproduction through seeds” has shown the possibility of producing clonal seeds by altering some genes that have a say in reproductive cell-division in plants which reproduce themselves asexually.

This strategy allows Apomixis, which refers to seed development without fertilisation of cell division which is hitherto impossible in food plants or their hybrid seeds, Dr Imran Siddiqi, Scientist at CCMB and one of the scientists who discovered the technique, told newspersons here on Friday.

The study, conducted in the model plant “Arabidopsis thaliana” provided a proof of principle demonstration of engineering apomixes in food crops,” Dr Siddiqi said.

ADVANTAGES

The method, if adopted at field level, would mean that farmers would be able to multiply their own hybrid seeds and not be compelled to buy them for every planting, he said.

Further, the productivity of seeds could be increased (10-15 per cent in wheat and 20-30 per cent in rice, for instance) by eliminating the loss of “hybrid vigour” (increased yield of a seed over both its parents).

“This is possible because the seeds could now be produced asexually so there is no question of hybrid seeds not performing as well as their parent over a period of time,'' he explained.

According to Dr C H Mohan Rao, Director CCMB, this would reduce the cost of hybrid seed production by reducing the time-cycles from about seven years to one year.

WAY AHEAD

“However, to translate the discovery into a farm practice, the efficiency needs to be improved further besides turning the process on and off at will so that one can use the seeds as per the needs,'' Dr Siddiqi said.

As the research was done by all publicly-funded institutes, efforts are on to provide access to technology to many stake-holders instead of rigid commercial patenting.

The scientists in the project were Mr Mohan P A Marimuthu, Dr Imran Siddiqi (of CCMB), Dr Raphael Mercier (INRA-France) and Dr Simon Chan (University of California).

When contacted, some seed companies mentioned there are several processes involved in cloning of seeds. It would be appropriate to study this approach before reacting.

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