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TNAU to research on `Golden Rice' technology transfer

By Our Staff Reporter

COIMBATORE May 25. The Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, is one of the four centres identified for development of technology to transfer the "Golden Rice" gene in traditional rice varieties. The Delhi University and two research institutes in Hyderabad were the other centres identified for the purpose by the Union Government's Department of Biotechnology (DBT), after it obtained a licence from inventors of the genetically modified (GM) rice.

Under the Indo-Swiss Collaborative Programme on biotechnology, Ingo Potrykus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Peter Beyer of the University of Freiburg authorised the DBT to supply seeds to research institutions, breeders and biotechnologists to develop an area-specific rice line for people. Besides India, Vietnam, China, South Africa, Indonesia and the Philippines have joined the collaborative programme. Other than South Africa, which was working on maize lines, the rest were on the rice lines, Dr. Beyer, who was at the TNAU here recently said. The findings of the research on the current lines would be available by the end of the year.

Elaborating on Golden Rice, he said by employing bio-technology, the common rice plant, which provided staple food for more than half of the world, was genetically modified to incorporate certain genes from the daffodil plant and bacteria. This facilitated the rice plant to modify certain metabolic pathways in its cells to produce the precursors to Vitamin A, which had not been possible so far.

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