Southern States - Andhra Pradesh

Drought-resistant rice varieties in the offing

By Our Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD April 19. A national research project funded by Rockfeller Foundation has made a substantial headway in developing drought-resistant rice varieties which are said to facilitate cultivation of paddy in water- limited areas in the near future.

The national rice biotechnology network project, coordinated by the University of Hyderabad , by using the right mix of conventional, molecular and cutting edge genomic technologies, is in the process of cracking the functional component of the rice genome that is associated with drought tolerance.

Project Coordinator A.R.Reddy says that the drought-tolerant rice varieties would be a reality in the next three to five years.

Depending on the progress of the work under the project, these varieties could be released to the farmers by the State Governments much ahead of the mandatory field studies and clearance by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).

Under the project, sponsored by the Rockfeller Foundation since 1990 with an outlay of about Rs .4 crores, five collaborative centres for improvement of rice varieties for the water limited environment by using genomic and genetic tolls were set up at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, Indira Gandhi Agricultural Univerisity, Chattisgarh. ICRISAT, Hyderabad and Hyderabad Central Univerisity.

The Centre at the Department of Plant Sciences of the Hyderabad University is coordinating the activities of all the other research centres.

The research group led by Prof. Reddy developed innovative approaches for discovering new genes that are responsible for drought tolerance. Recently, the team made a coding gene bank of rice consisting of more than 20,000 clones from drought-stressed rice leaves. Of them, 2500 clones were sequenced and deposited in the GeneBank for global usage. Most of them have been published in international journal too.

The institutions involved are using advanced technologies of molecular mapping and phenotyping. ICRISAT is mainly involved in the phenotypic evaluation of the parental lines and mapping populations contributed by the project investigators. It is a high quality central facility for precise evaluation of the rice lines under managed field drought conditions.

The project investigators met here last week and reviewed the work of the collaborating units. The research to evolve drought-resistant varieties assumes importance as drought happens to be the major constraint in rice production in India.

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