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M. Somasekhar

HYDERABAD, April 11

INDIAN rice experts and scientists from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Philippines will hold a joint meeting in May to discuss the prospects of firming up an initiative on functional genomics.

The meeting slated on May 21 and 22 in New Delhi will unveil the roadmap for India to journey in the utilisation of data that is expected to emerge from the global rice genome sequence programmes, according to Dr Mangala Rai, Deputy Director General (DDG) of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).

Efforts led by the multinational Syngenta, Monsanto and the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), China have succeeded in sequencing the genome of the two rice species — Japonica and Indica. The sequences have been published in leading scientific journals recently.

To derive advantage from these developments as well as accelerate the country's own rice genome programme, about 35 top experts from various ICAR institutes, agriculture universities, research centres under the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) etc will participate in the New Delhi meeting, Dr Rai told Business Line here.

Sequencing the rice genome is one thing, the next step is identifying the characteristics of the about 45,000 genes (functional genomics) and then utilising them for increasing global production is the coming challenge.

The Indian rice genome programme being coordinated by ICAR, DBT with major participation by a Japanese research consortium has been entrusted the responsibility of sequencing the entire Chromosome-11. ``We have been doing the sequencing three times faster than scheduled'', the ICAR Crop Sciences Chief said.

The announcement made by Syngenta and BGI and earlier by Monsanto that the sequenced data would be made available in public domain would help us in getting the larger picture of the application of the rice genome mapping, he said.

Dr Swapan Datta, plant breeder at IRRI, said ``it is good that a couple of players have sequenced the rice genome. Competition and availability of data in public domain will help boost both research and ultimately production''.

Both the scientists were in city participating in the 37th All-India Rice Research Group Meeting, hosted by the Directorate of Rice Research (DRR). The 4-day meeting began on April 7 and nearly 400 rice scientists, policy makers and state government officials are participating.

Dr B. Mishra, Project Director of DRR, said four new export quality rice varieties — CSR-30 (Yamini), Pusa Sugand-2 and Pusa Sugand-3 and Vasumati (Basmati) — were released by the Central Variety Release Committee during 2001 to meet the demands of export competitiveness in Basmati class of aromatic quality rice.

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