A memorial lecture remembering Dr.Ashok S Jurwarkar on, ‘Genomics assisted breeding for infusing climate resilience into green revolution varieties of rice’ was held at CSIR- National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) on July 15. The workshop was given by NK Singh, National Professor at ICAR National Institute of Biotechnology, New Delhi, in the NEERI auditorium, during which he discussed the difference that time has brought in the costing of seeds and other similar topics.
The disease resistance and the productivity of a crop lies in its genes, therefore genome research & study and its decoding is an important subject to consider for high yielding and disease-resistant varieties of crops, said Singh while addressing the attendees. He further added that about 1200 genes are associated with disease resistance and 152 of genes work as tolerance towards drought, heat, and salinity. He even added that the genetic evolution would help our farmers in building up better crops which will be capable of tolerating the climate change.
The wheat is the hardest crop to accelerate its breeding and we face major challenges to enhance its productivity, added Singh talking about the challenges that the genome industry is facing.
He further informed that the first sequencing of plant genome was at the cost of rupees 11 crores and that the ICAR team was able to sequence 61 percent of the genome and identified 47,004 genes in Arhar crop.
For the workshop JS Pandey, chief scientist and head of climate change and skilling department were present along with Hemant Purohit, senior-most scientist of NEERI.
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