I am Kedar N. Rai, working as a pearl millet breeder (using conventional breeding approaches and achieving great successes) at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Patancheru, India. But I do try to read and follow the discussions on application aspects of genomics, and it is with this intent that I joined this e-conference. 

I have read with interest the points raised by Dr. PK Gupta (Message 1) and I generally agree with him. I believe that quite a lot of basic work and validation of the results using diverse genetic backgrounds and test environments needs to be done to convince about the efficiency of genomics and other biotech tools (cost consideration not to be forgotten) in crop improvement. Its value in improving highly heritable traits controlled by few major genes cannot be doubted, although in many cases it has not been convincingly demonstrated as to why that improvement was thought un-amenable through conventional approaches: a few selected examples may not help (rather a list of successful/unsuccessful examples will be more convincing). Such things as genomic selection, proteomics, transcriptomics etc. are good researches for biological understanding, and may be useful breeding tools in quite distant future. Hope these will not end up the way research on drought tolerance mechanisms (tons of books and research/conference papers) with limited application successes went. It may be decades before these new biotech tools will find routine applications in applied plant breeding. The need for enormous increase in food production in the next 30 years is well known, and yield potential improvement remains the big challenge. These new tools for yield improvement ?--any leads having passed large-scale demonstrations with on-farm impacts?  

Kedar N. Rai
Principal Scientist and 
Director, HarvestPlus-India Biofortification 
Dryland Cereals Research Program 
ICRISAT, Patancheru 502 324
India
Tel (O)  +91-40-3071 3323
    (H)  +91-40-23000534
Mob      : +91-0-9963572888
Fax (O) : +91-40-3071 3074
E-mail    : k.rai (at) cgiar.org 
Website : www.icrisat.org 
 
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