India has started work on the International Rice Genome Project (IRGP) and will complete its task of identifying two million base pairs of a particular rice chromosome by the end of next year, Manju Sharma, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology (DBT), has said. “Work has already started on the project by scientists under DBT and Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), for which DBT has sanctioned Rs 20 crore,” Sharma told members of Indian Science Writers Association in New Delhi on Thursday. The total budget for the Indian part of IRGP is Rs 48 crore.
India joined IRGP, a five-year international project started in 1997, in June this year as the ninth member. Other participant countries are the US, the UK, Canada, Korea, Thailand, France, Taiwan and China. “Detailed information from Rice genome would help understand the genome structure of other cereals and oil crops and India would benefit from getting access to research data from other participating countries,” she said. “About half-a-million base pairs of chromosome-11 would be sequenced by Indian scientists by June 2001,” she said. “Food security being one of the prime issues of the future, genome studies on wheat have also been initiated by DBT at Meerut University,” she said. Bureau Report