Dr. Shabir Hussain Wani Assistant Professor (Senior Scale) cum Scientist, Genetics and Plant Breeding at Mountain Research Centre for Field Crops, Khudwani, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, Srinagar J Phone: 9419035566
Genetic improvement of temperate fruit and nut crops through conventional breeding methods is not... more Genetic improvement of temperate fruit and nut crops through conventional breeding methods is not sufficient alone due to its extreme time-consuming, cost-intensive, and hard-to-handle approach. Again, few other constraints that are associated with these species, viz., their long juvenile period, high heterozygosity, sterility, presence of sexual incompatibility, polyploidy, etc., make their selection and improvement process more complicated. Therefore, to promote precise and accurate selection of plants based on their genotypes, supplement of advanced biotechnological tools, viz., molecular marker approaches along with traditional breeding methods, is highly required in these species. Different markers, especially the molecular ones, enable direct selection of genomic regions governing the trait of interest such as high quality, yield, and resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses instead of the trait itself, thus saving the overall time and space and helping screen fruit quality a...
Maize is the third most common cereal crop worldwide, after rice and wheat, and plays a vital rol... more Maize is the third most common cereal crop worldwide, after rice and wheat, and plays a vital role in preventing global hunger crises. Approximately 50% of global crop yields are reduced by drought stress. Bacteria as biostimulants for biopriming can improve yield and enhance sustainable food production. Further, seed biopriming stimulates plant defense mechanisms. In this study, we isolated bacteria from the rhizosphere of Artemisia plants from Pohang beach, Daegu, South Korea. Twenty-three isolates were isolated and screened for growth promoting potential. Among them, bacterial isolate SH-6 was selected based on maximum induced tolerance to polyethylene glycol-simulated drought. SH-6 showed ABA concentration = 1.06 ± 0.04 ng/mL, phosphate solubilizing index = 3.7, and sucrose concentration = 0.51 ± 0.13 mg/mL. The novel isolate SH-6 markedly enhanced maize seedling tolerance to oxidative stress owing to the presence of superoxide dismutase, catalase, and ascorbate peroxidase activ...
Climate change continues to threaten global crop output by reducing annual productivity. As a res... more Climate change continues to threaten global crop output by reducing annual productivity. As a result, global food security is now considered as one of the most important challenges facing humanity. To address this challenge, modern crop breeding approaches are required to create plants that can cope with increased abiotic/biotic stress. Metabolomics is rapidly gaining traction in plant breeding by predicting the metabolic marker for plant performance under a stressful environment and has emerged as a powerful tool for guiding crop improvement. The advent of more sensitive, automated, and high-throughput analytical tools combined with advanced bioinformatics and other omics techniques has laid the foundation to broadly characterize the genetic traits for crop improvement. Progress in metabolomics allows scientists to rapidly map specific metabolites to the genes that encode their metabolic pathways and offer plant scientists an excellent opportunity to fully explore and rationally ha...
Among abiotic stresses, heat stress is described as one of the major limiting factors of crop gro... more Among abiotic stresses, heat stress is described as one of the major limiting factors of crop growth worldwide, as high temperatures elicit a series of physiological, molecular, and biochemical cascade events that ultimately result in reduced crop yield. There is growing interest among researchers in the use of beneficial microorganisms. Intricate and highly complex interactions between plants and microbes result in the alleviation of heat stress. Plant–microbe interactions are mediated by the production of phytohormones, siderophores, gene expression, osmolytes, and volatile compounds in plants. Their interaction improves antioxidant activity and accumulation of compatible osmolytes such as proline, glycine betaine, soluble sugar, and trehalose, and enriches the nutrient status of stressed plants. Therefore, this review aims to discuss the heat response of plants and to understand the mechanisms of microbe-mediated stress alleviation on a physio-molecular basis. This review indicat...
Globally, about 20% of calories (energy) come from wheat. In some countries, it is more than 70%.... more Globally, about 20% of calories (energy) come from wheat. In some countries, it is more than 70%. More than 2 billion people are at risk for zinc deficiency and even more, people are at risk of iron deficiency, nearly a quarter of all children underage group of 5 are physically and cognitively stunted, and lack of dietary zinc is a major contributing factor. Biofortified wheat with elevated levels of zinc and iron has several potential advantages as a delivery vehicle for micronutrients in the diets of resource-poor consumers who depend on cereal-based diets. The conventional breeding strategies have been successful in the introduction of novel alleles for grain Zn and Fe that led to the release of competitive Zn enriched wheat varieties in South Asia. The major challenge over the next few decades will be to maintain the rates of genetic gains for grain yield along with increased grain Zn/Fe concentration to meet the food and nutritional security challenges. Therefore, to remain com...
Breeding crops in a conventional way demands considerable time, space, inputs for selection, and ... more Breeding crops in a conventional way demands considerable time, space, inputs for selection, and the subsequent crossing of desirable plants. The duration of the seed-to-seed cycle is one of the crucial bottlenecks in the progress of plant research and breeding. In this context, speed breeding (SB), relying mainly on photoperiod extension, temperature control, and early seed harvest, has the potential to accelerate the rate of plant improvement. Well demonstrated in the case of long-day plants, the SB protocols are being extended to short-day plants to reduce the generation interval time. Flexibility in SB protocols allows them to align and integrate with diverse research purposes including population development, genomic selection, phenotyping, and genomic editing. In this review, we discuss the different SB methodologies and their application to hasten future plant improvement. Though SB has been extensively used in plant phenotyping and the pyramiding of multiple traits for the d...
Key message Improving crop resistance against insect pests is crucial for ensuring future food se... more Key message Improving crop resistance against insect pests is crucial for ensuring future food security. Integrating genomics with modern breeding methods holds enormous potential in dissecting the genetic architecture of this complex trait and accelerating crop improvement. Abstract Insect resistance in crops has been a major research objective in several crop improvement programs. However, the use of conventional breeding methods to develop high-yielding cultivars with sustainable and durable insect pest resistance has been largely unsuccessful. The use of molecular markers for identification and deployment of insect resistance quantitative trait loci (QTLs) can fastrack traditional breeding methods. Till date, several QTLs for insect pest resistance have been identified in field-grown crops, and a few of them have been cloned by positional cloning approaches. Genome editing technologies, such as CRISPR/Cas9, are paving the way to tailor insect pest resistance loci for designing c...
Rice blast is considered one of the most important fungal diseases of rice. Although diseases can... more Rice blast is considered one of the most important fungal diseases of rice. Although diseases can be managed by using resistant cultivars, the blast pathogen has successfully overcome the single gene resistance in a short period and rendered several varieties susceptible to blast which were otherwise intended to be resistant. As such, chemical control is still the most efficient method of disease control for reducing the losses caused due to diseases. Field experiments were conducted over two successive years, 2018 and 2019, in temperate rice growing areas in northern India. All the fungicides effectively reduced leaf blast incidence and intensity, and neck blast incidence under field conditions. Tricyclazole proved most effective against rice blast and recorded a leaf blast incidence of only 8.41%. Among the combinations of fungicides, azoxystrobin + difenoconazole and azoxystrobin + tebuconazole were highly effective, recording a leaf blast incidence of 9.19 and 10.40%, respective...
Waterlogging, caused by flooding, excessive rains and poor drainage is a serious abiotic stress d... more Waterlogging, caused by flooding, excessive rains and poor drainage is a serious abiotic stress determining crop productivity worldwide. Maize (Zea mays L) is a basic food grain in many areas and several cultures and is culti- vated under much diverse agro-climatic zones extending from subtropical to cooler temperate regions. Therefore, the crop remains open to varied types of biotic as well as abiotic stresses. Among various abiotic stresses, water- logging is one of the most important constraints for maize production and productivity. Breeding for improved wa- terlogging tolerance includes modification of plant morphology, use of tolerant secondary traits and development of resistant varieties through conventional breeding and biotechnological approaches. A successful programme in conventional breeding should involve the integration of several criteria into one selection index and also successful breeding programmes for improved tolerance to submergence stress frequently combine t...
Bombyx mori L. (silkworm) is of high commercial importance as a silk producer and is also widely ... more Bombyx mori L. (silkworm) is of high commercial importance as a silk producer and is also widely used for implementation of basic and applied research. Silkworm are distributed both in temperate and tropical countries. The tropical genotypes (non diapausing) are hardy and can withstand adverse eco-climatic conditions but produce very small quantities of silk of poor quality while the genotypes of temperate origin (diapausing) produce higher quantities of good quality silk. Evaluation of genetic resources is an essential prerequisite for their effective utilization. The presently available linkage map is based on morphological and bio-chemical markers. Biochemical markers resulted in the identification of only one enzyme -amylase. The development of molecular markers will be extremely useful in silkworm improvement programme. The molecular markers such as RFLP, RAPD, SSR, ISSR and AFLP have been successfully used for identification and genetic diversity in silkworm.
Research & Reviews: Journal of Botanical Sciences, 2015
At present agriculture not only provides food, but is also used for the production of pharmaceuti... more At present agriculture not only provides food, but is also used for the production of pharmaceuticals or industrial compounds such as pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines along with biodegradable plastic and industrial chemicals. Since last three decades, plant genetic engineering has played a vital role in the production of bio-pharmaceutical products from crops. Due to technological advancement of genetic engineering, biotechnologist are able to engineer plants by using living organism with the help of different transformation techniques like Agrobacterium mediated transformation, biolistic gene gun, and so on to produce biopharmaceuticals products for diagnostic purposes as well as nutritional supplements.
Genetic improvement of temperate fruit and nut crops through conventional breeding methods is not... more Genetic improvement of temperate fruit and nut crops through conventional breeding methods is not sufficient alone due to its extreme time-consuming, cost-intensive, and hard-to-handle approach. Again, few other constraints that are associated with these species, viz., their long juvenile period, high heterozygosity, sterility, presence of sexual incompatibility, polyploidy, etc., make their selection and improvement process more complicated. Therefore, to promote precise and accurate selection of plants based on their genotypes, supplement of advanced biotechnological tools, viz., molecular marker approaches along with traditional breeding methods, is highly required in these species. Different markers, especially the molecular ones, enable direct selection of genomic regions governing the trait of interest such as high quality, yield, and resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses instead of the trait itself, thus saving the overall time and space and helping screen fruit quality a...
Maize is the third most common cereal crop worldwide, after rice and wheat, and plays a vital rol... more Maize is the third most common cereal crop worldwide, after rice and wheat, and plays a vital role in preventing global hunger crises. Approximately 50% of global crop yields are reduced by drought stress. Bacteria as biostimulants for biopriming can improve yield and enhance sustainable food production. Further, seed biopriming stimulates plant defense mechanisms. In this study, we isolated bacteria from the rhizosphere of Artemisia plants from Pohang beach, Daegu, South Korea. Twenty-three isolates were isolated and screened for growth promoting potential. Among them, bacterial isolate SH-6 was selected based on maximum induced tolerance to polyethylene glycol-simulated drought. SH-6 showed ABA concentration = 1.06 ± 0.04 ng/mL, phosphate solubilizing index = 3.7, and sucrose concentration = 0.51 ± 0.13 mg/mL. The novel isolate SH-6 markedly enhanced maize seedling tolerance to oxidative stress owing to the presence of superoxide dismutase, catalase, and ascorbate peroxidase activ...
Climate change continues to threaten global crop output by reducing annual productivity. As a res... more Climate change continues to threaten global crop output by reducing annual productivity. As a result, global food security is now considered as one of the most important challenges facing humanity. To address this challenge, modern crop breeding approaches are required to create plants that can cope with increased abiotic/biotic stress. Metabolomics is rapidly gaining traction in plant breeding by predicting the metabolic marker for plant performance under a stressful environment and has emerged as a powerful tool for guiding crop improvement. The advent of more sensitive, automated, and high-throughput analytical tools combined with advanced bioinformatics and other omics techniques has laid the foundation to broadly characterize the genetic traits for crop improvement. Progress in metabolomics allows scientists to rapidly map specific metabolites to the genes that encode their metabolic pathways and offer plant scientists an excellent opportunity to fully explore and rationally ha...
Among abiotic stresses, heat stress is described as one of the major limiting factors of crop gro... more Among abiotic stresses, heat stress is described as one of the major limiting factors of crop growth worldwide, as high temperatures elicit a series of physiological, molecular, and biochemical cascade events that ultimately result in reduced crop yield. There is growing interest among researchers in the use of beneficial microorganisms. Intricate and highly complex interactions between plants and microbes result in the alleviation of heat stress. Plant–microbe interactions are mediated by the production of phytohormones, siderophores, gene expression, osmolytes, and volatile compounds in plants. Their interaction improves antioxidant activity and accumulation of compatible osmolytes such as proline, glycine betaine, soluble sugar, and trehalose, and enriches the nutrient status of stressed plants. Therefore, this review aims to discuss the heat response of plants and to understand the mechanisms of microbe-mediated stress alleviation on a physio-molecular basis. This review indicat...
Globally, about 20% of calories (energy) come from wheat. In some countries, it is more than 70%.... more Globally, about 20% of calories (energy) come from wheat. In some countries, it is more than 70%. More than 2 billion people are at risk for zinc deficiency and even more, people are at risk of iron deficiency, nearly a quarter of all children underage group of 5 are physically and cognitively stunted, and lack of dietary zinc is a major contributing factor. Biofortified wheat with elevated levels of zinc and iron has several potential advantages as a delivery vehicle for micronutrients in the diets of resource-poor consumers who depend on cereal-based diets. The conventional breeding strategies have been successful in the introduction of novel alleles for grain Zn and Fe that led to the release of competitive Zn enriched wheat varieties in South Asia. The major challenge over the next few decades will be to maintain the rates of genetic gains for grain yield along with increased grain Zn/Fe concentration to meet the food and nutritional security challenges. Therefore, to remain com...
Breeding crops in a conventional way demands considerable time, space, inputs for selection, and ... more Breeding crops in a conventional way demands considerable time, space, inputs for selection, and the subsequent crossing of desirable plants. The duration of the seed-to-seed cycle is one of the crucial bottlenecks in the progress of plant research and breeding. In this context, speed breeding (SB), relying mainly on photoperiod extension, temperature control, and early seed harvest, has the potential to accelerate the rate of plant improvement. Well demonstrated in the case of long-day plants, the SB protocols are being extended to short-day plants to reduce the generation interval time. Flexibility in SB protocols allows them to align and integrate with diverse research purposes including population development, genomic selection, phenotyping, and genomic editing. In this review, we discuss the different SB methodologies and their application to hasten future plant improvement. Though SB has been extensively used in plant phenotyping and the pyramiding of multiple traits for the d...
Key message Improving crop resistance against insect pests is crucial for ensuring future food se... more Key message Improving crop resistance against insect pests is crucial for ensuring future food security. Integrating genomics with modern breeding methods holds enormous potential in dissecting the genetic architecture of this complex trait and accelerating crop improvement. Abstract Insect resistance in crops has been a major research objective in several crop improvement programs. However, the use of conventional breeding methods to develop high-yielding cultivars with sustainable and durable insect pest resistance has been largely unsuccessful. The use of molecular markers for identification and deployment of insect resistance quantitative trait loci (QTLs) can fastrack traditional breeding methods. Till date, several QTLs for insect pest resistance have been identified in field-grown crops, and a few of them have been cloned by positional cloning approaches. Genome editing technologies, such as CRISPR/Cas9, are paving the way to tailor insect pest resistance loci for designing c...
Rice blast is considered one of the most important fungal diseases of rice. Although diseases can... more Rice blast is considered one of the most important fungal diseases of rice. Although diseases can be managed by using resistant cultivars, the blast pathogen has successfully overcome the single gene resistance in a short period and rendered several varieties susceptible to blast which were otherwise intended to be resistant. As such, chemical control is still the most efficient method of disease control for reducing the losses caused due to diseases. Field experiments were conducted over two successive years, 2018 and 2019, in temperate rice growing areas in northern India. All the fungicides effectively reduced leaf blast incidence and intensity, and neck blast incidence under field conditions. Tricyclazole proved most effective against rice blast and recorded a leaf blast incidence of only 8.41%. Among the combinations of fungicides, azoxystrobin + difenoconazole and azoxystrobin + tebuconazole were highly effective, recording a leaf blast incidence of 9.19 and 10.40%, respective...
Waterlogging, caused by flooding, excessive rains and poor drainage is a serious abiotic stress d... more Waterlogging, caused by flooding, excessive rains and poor drainage is a serious abiotic stress determining crop productivity worldwide. Maize (Zea mays L) is a basic food grain in many areas and several cultures and is culti- vated under much diverse agro-climatic zones extending from subtropical to cooler temperate regions. Therefore, the crop remains open to varied types of biotic as well as abiotic stresses. Among various abiotic stresses, water- logging is one of the most important constraints for maize production and productivity. Breeding for improved wa- terlogging tolerance includes modification of plant morphology, use of tolerant secondary traits and development of resistant varieties through conventional breeding and biotechnological approaches. A successful programme in conventional breeding should involve the integration of several criteria into one selection index and also successful breeding programmes for improved tolerance to submergence stress frequently combine t...
Bombyx mori L. (silkworm) is of high commercial importance as a silk producer and is also widely ... more Bombyx mori L. (silkworm) is of high commercial importance as a silk producer and is also widely used for implementation of basic and applied research. Silkworm are distributed both in temperate and tropical countries. The tropical genotypes (non diapausing) are hardy and can withstand adverse eco-climatic conditions but produce very small quantities of silk of poor quality while the genotypes of temperate origin (diapausing) produce higher quantities of good quality silk. Evaluation of genetic resources is an essential prerequisite for their effective utilization. The presently available linkage map is based on morphological and bio-chemical markers. Biochemical markers resulted in the identification of only one enzyme -amylase. The development of molecular markers will be extremely useful in silkworm improvement programme. The molecular markers such as RFLP, RAPD, SSR, ISSR and AFLP have been successfully used for identification and genetic diversity in silkworm.
Research & Reviews: Journal of Botanical Sciences, 2015
At present agriculture not only provides food, but is also used for the production of pharmaceuti... more At present agriculture not only provides food, but is also used for the production of pharmaceuticals or industrial compounds such as pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines along with biodegradable plastic and industrial chemicals. Since last three decades, plant genetic engineering has played a vital role in the production of bio-pharmaceutical products from crops. Due to technological advancement of genetic engineering, biotechnologist are able to engineer plants by using living organism with the help of different transformation techniques like Agrobacterium mediated transformation, biolistic gene gun, and so on to produce biopharmaceuticals products for diagnostic purposes as well as nutritional supplements.
Plants respond to low temperatures with changes in their pattern of gene expression and protein p... more Plants respond to low temperatures with changes in their pattern of gene expression and protein products. Many species of tropical or subtropical origin are injured or killed by non-freezing low temperature, and exhibit various symptoms of chilling injury such as chlorosis, necrosis, or growth retardation. In contrast, chilling tolerant species are able to grow at such cold temperatures. Conventional breeding methods have met with limited success in improving the cold tolerance of important crop plants through inter-specific or inter-generic hybridization. Recent studies involving full genome profiling/sequencing, mutational and transgenic plant analyses have provided a deep insight of the complex transcriptional mechanism that operates under cold stress. The alterations in expression of genes in response to cold temperatures are followed by increases in the levels of hundreds of metabolites, some of which are known to have protective effects against the damaging effects of cold stress. Various low temperature inducible genes have been isolated from plants. Most appear to be involved in tolerance to cold stress and the expression of some of them is regulated by C-repeat binding factor/dehydration-responsive element binding (CBF/DREB1) transcription factors. Numerous physiological and molecular changes occur during cold acclimation reveals that the cold resistance is more complex than perceived and involves more than one pathway. The findings summarized in this review have shown potential practical applications for breeding cold tolerance in crop and horticultural plants suitable to temperate geographical locations.
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