Lucknow-based National Botanical Research Institute (NBRI) has become the first institute in the world to isolate an anti-whitefly gene (designated as Tma12) from a fern. This should please cotton farmers in Punjab and Haryana, one of the worst hit by the pest attack over the past couple of years.
A team of NBRI researchers led by senior scientist P K Singh has even introduced it into cotton and successfully completed its trial for three years and over six generations, thus proving its efficacy. This means farmers will get whitefly-resistant cotton seed in the next five years.
“The process of transferring the technology to Punjab Agriculture University (PAU) in Ludhiana is on. We are taking legal advice and both the institutions have started seeking permission from the Union government’s Review Committee of Genetic Manipulation (RCGM). There is no monetary transaction involved and we hope to be able to transfer the seeds to PAU by January,” says Singh.
Last year, the whitefly outbreak caused devastation of cotton crop in 1.5 million hectares in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. The revenue loss to farmers was estimated to be Rs 10,000 crore, despite the use of pesticides worth Rs 500 crore.
“Around September last year, I wrote to the Punjab chief minister, chief secretary and several other people. PAU vice-chancellor Baldev Singh Dhillon responded. In November a team from PAU visited NBRI and studied our research
,” Singh adds.Though, farmers in Punjab and Haryana will have to wait for five years before they can start buying the seed, this is the first clear long-term solution to have emerged in a long time. “There is no GM technology available for the control of whitefly in world. India, Pakistan, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, USA, China and Australia are affected by whitefly. This insect also wreaks havoc in African countries. The major affected crops are cotton, tomato, brinjal, capsicum, chilli, cucumber, other vegetables and a few legumes,” says Singh.
“The study was initiated in 2007 and we developed whitefly resistant GM cotton in 2012. A paper was submitted to top global journal, Nature Biotechnology, for publication in September 2015. After very rigorous review, this paper was accepted for publication on August 10, 2016,” a release from NBRI reads.
“This is for the first time that a novel insecticidal protein was discovered from an untapped source. Whitefly resistant transgenic crops have been a worldwide unmet need of agriculture biotechnology; our technology has filled the gap. This gene can be deployed in more than 30 crops to protect the yield without application of hazardous pesticides,” says Singh.
NBRI’s Praveen Verma, K Chandrashekhar and Ajit Pratap Singh co-authored the paper with P K Singh, who adds that some scientists from Central Drug Research Institute (another CSIR institution) helped with safety tests.
