Mobility paves Samsung’s silver path
The Korean giant’s early bet on mobile phones helped it hit the $10-bn mark in India, but in its 25th year it ...
India accounts for nearly 80 per cent of pigeonpea (tur) production in the world. - PV SIVAKUMAR
Researchers from International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), in Patancheru in Hyderabad, and their collaborators have unravelled a molecular mechanism involved in controlling male fertility in pigeonpea (tur) crop, making it possible to develop better hybrid crops at reduced cost and efforts in future.
Tur is a major pulses crop and is particularly grown in semi-arid areas by smallholder farmers. India accounts for nearly 80 per cent of pigeonpea production in the world. Despite varietal development programmes, the productivity of conventional pigeonpea varieties remained at 700 to 900 kg per hectare. Some commendable efforts by ICRISAT researchers and their partners in the past led to development of hybrids which can yield 30 to 40 per cent more, but this seed production system using current hybrid technology ― called three-line hybrid technology by scientists ― is cumbersome and costly.
In some crops like rice, three-line hybrid technology was converted to two-line hybrid technology by using a particular variety that can become fertile and sterile in different environmental conditions. In this study of the plant at the cellular and protein expression levels, the researchers, including scientists from the University of Vienna in Austria, found that the plants transition from male sterile to male fertile when the temperature of the growing environment is reduced to 24 degrees Celsius. Plant lines that exhibit such reversal of sterility to fertility and vice versa are key to developing hybrids using two-line hybrid technology and are used widely by plant breeders all over the world.
“In our study, we could dissect that this transition is happening just because temperature changes (and not any other environmental conditions), and we determined that that line remains fertile under 24 degrees Celsius and becomes sterile at temperatures higher than 24 degree Celsius,” said Rajeev K Varshney, Director - Centre of Excellence in Genomics and Systems Biology at ICRISAT, who led the study together with another ICRISAT colleague Rachit K Saxena and Wolfram WeckWerth of the University of Vienna. The study appeared in the journal Plant Genome recently.
More importantly, the study found that when auxins ― a class of hormones that plants produce for growth ― applied externally, the plant’s sterility could be reversed up to certain ambient temperatures.
This understanding can help scientists and breeders produce better hybrid pigeonpea varieties using the two-line hybrid technology more easily and at cheaper rates. It may help reduce the cost of seed production by 30 to 50 per cent.
The two-line hybrid technology is more popular among plant breeders. For instance, such a system is popular in rice, where the two-line based hybrid rice occupies about 30 per cent of the total hybrid rice growing areas with up to 5-10 per cent higher yield than the three-line hybrids.
“Technically, the production of hybrid seeds and parental line maintenance would be much easier in the two-line system. However, it is important to mention that specific locations should be identified with the required conditions to implement the two-line hybrid technology (in pigeonpea),” said Varshney.
The Korean giant’s early bet on mobile phones helped it hit the $10-bn mark in India, but in its 25th year it ...
Antrix should adopt a different tactic than merely fighting over jurisdiction: Experts
Invest in relationships, enterprise, behaviour, effort and learning
From different types of osmoses to new membranes, researchers have come up with ways of drawing water
What filters should you apply when mining for under-the-radar small-cap stocks? Read on to find more
High valuation, intensely competitive landscape and small cap nature of the stock are key risks.
Amid choppiness, the benchmark indices slipped marginally; approach the week with caution
SBI Cards (₹1,032.7): Witnesses fresh breakoutBetween September and December last year, the stock of SBI Cards ...
That weekend came the news that Champa’s elder daughter was engaged, the proof arriving in the form of Jaimini ...
“Amma,” Divya yelled from the bathroom. “There’s something in my teeth.”Balakrishnan and Veena froze and ...
What makes the new crop of young Indian cricketers such game-changing winners? Over and above their talent, ...
For their dead, Parsis practise a 3,000-year-old system where corpses are excarnated in the Tower of Silence, ...
WPP agency Wunderman Thompson has launched its annual Future 100 report, lifting the lid on trends shaping the ...
Paneer, once alien to the South, has found a lucrative market in Chennai
Social media influencers are flipping the rules by first getting followers and then launching products and ...
The Flipkart kids playing adults are back — this time to push the home grown e-commerce marketplace’s grocery ...
Three years after its inception, compliance with GST procedures remains a headache for exporters, job workers ...
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives of companies are altering the prospects for wooden toys of ...
Aequs Aerospace to create space for large-scale manufacture of toys at Koppal
And it has every reason to smile. Covid-19 has triggered a consumer shift towards branded products as ...
Please Email the Editor