Ludhiana:
India has collaborated in a global project to unravel the secrets of the genes that make wheat, which, scientists say, will help produce better and more resilient crop.
Scientists from three Indian institutes were part of an unprecedented global collaboration of 15 countries to map 40,000 out of a total of 120,000 genes that make up wheat.
India, which invested about Rs 34 crores in the project, took the lead in sequencing one full chromosome.
"We were equal partners in decoding the DNA of such an important crop. We can now use this resource to transfer genes from one variety to another variety in a precise manner," explained Kuldeep Singh, the lead Indian researcher. Dr Singh is a plant biotechnologist at the Punjab Agriculture University in Ludhiana.
The project involves highly-skilled scientists, mostly women, extracting the genetic material of wheat and using a combination of robots, computers and human intelligence, to sort the multi-colored patterns into genes.
This database will now be available to wheat breeders to pick and choose the genes they need to produce stronger varieties that can withstand drought and changing climate while producing "more crop per drop".
The genes can be channelized into "desirable backgrounds", then cloned and used to breed drought-resistance varieties.
India annually produces about 96 million tons of wheat. Officials say the output has to be doubled to meet the food needs of 1.5 billion Indians in the next four decades.
The Punjab Agriculture University in Ludhiana was the cradle of the first Green Revolution in India, and today the same university is ushering in another Green Revolution by partnering in the deciphering of the wheat genome.
A global scientific effort has published the near - complete genome sequence of wheat in the prestigious American journal
Science.