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Genomics and Applied Biology, 2011, Vol.2 No.4
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spend more on agriculture (Source-UN Food and
Agriculture Organization). So the need is to increase
world agriculture output by 70% between 2011 and
2050 to feed a world population that has recently
crossed 7 billion in October 2011 and further exceeding
to 9 billion by 2050. There are a lot of deviations due
to present climatic changes that lead to decrease in
timely precipitation, increase in temperature, and have
drastic effect on sustainability. The threat for resources
like water, food, health, land and environment are
evident. Agriculture will be affected largely by such
changing climate and the need will be to have next
generation crops that will be climate proof. A decline
in the crop yield will also impact all other aspects of
life. The changing climate will affect various plant
processes such as germination, flowering, time of
pollination, fertilization, seed development etc. The
final outcome will be the
reduction in the yield of
crops. Many threatened species are needed to be
conserved and biotechnological tools can play a
crucial role. Hence, one of the major tasks is to
increase the crop production under such devastating
conditions viz-a-viz conservation of biodiversity to
attain sustainability and feed the growing population.
For increasing crop production, we cannot ignore the
dependence on technologies, a technology having
prolific outcome with sustainability is a ray of hope
for betterment of agriculture.
1 Impact of climate change
As discussed, climate change will lead to deviation in
precipitation, temperature, etc and which will have an
impact on crops. About 50% of available irrigation
water is required for rice cultivation in India (Kumar,
2006), and as per predictions there will be frequent
droughts in future so the need is to develop varieties
that can grow in low moisture content. As far as the
impact of climate change on plant disease is concern,
various published reports suggest that, due to altered
temperature and precipitation profiles, new combinations
of pests and diseases may emerge. Any increase in the
frequency or severity of extreme weather events, including
droughts, heat waves, windstorms or floods, could also
disrupt the predator-prey relationships that normally
keep pest populations in check. So the effect of
climate may increase pest population that may be one
of the reasons for loss of biodiversity (McMichael et
al., 2003), and further it is believed that negative
effects of climate change on agriculture in poor
countries could put an additional 40 to 300 million
people at risk of hunger by 2060 (McMichael et al.,
2003). So we must plan for developing new varieties
that can sustain very well under deviated climatic
conditions.
2 Need for 2
nd
green revolution (GENOME
REVOLUTION)
Dr. Borlaug an American agronomist is well known as
the father of the Green Revolution (Brown, 1970;
Borlaug, 2007). The technologies such as pesticides,
irrigation, nitrogen fertilizers and development of
improved crop varieties through conventional breeding
methods were spread in the Green Revolution (Borlaug
and Dowswell, 2004) that allowed food production to
keep pace with worldwide population growth. The
question is how to go further? As population is increasing
at an alarming rate and conditions for agriculture are
getting difficult due to changing climate. Hence, the
need is to develop environmental friendly technologies
that can improve agriculture and feed the growing
population. One way is to adopt environmental
friendly technologies for developing climate proof
crops without ruining biodiversity, because it is the
rich biodiversity that may provide useful genetic
resources to withstand such potentially damaging (to
crops) conditions. This is what we feel should be the
next Green Revolution, which is possible by manipulating
crop genomes. During Green Revolution, various
conventional breeding approaches were applied, and
that by now are fully exploited for enhancing the crop
productivity. Now we need to work for genome
manipulation (genes, proteins and metabolites) to further
improve crop plants, and thus agriculture itself. Here
we propose some OMICS based strategies for genome
revolution.
3 Biotechnological approaches for next genera-
tion crops (climate proof crops)
3.1 Molecular breeding approach
Through molecular breeding, it is feasible to transfer
traits in elite cultivars of a particular species. As
number of QTLs for various abiotic stress tolerance
related traits [e.g: long root in rice, Si accumulation in
rice (Zargar et al., 2011)] have been mapped on different
chromosomes, it is easy to introgress such QTLs