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ICRISAT genebank head gets top germplasm award by US body - 17-Jan-2014
Hyderabad: Top crop institute ICRISAT's head of genebank Hari D Upadhyaya has been honoured with the 2013 Frank N Meyer Medal for Plant Genetic Resources Award by the Crop Science Society of America at its annual meeting in Florida.
In his award lecture on 'Crop germplasm to overcome challenges to global food and nutritional security', Upadhyaya emphasised on how large germplasm collections can meet the food and nutritional needs of the ever-increasing world population, which would be over nine billion by 2050, requiring over 70 per cent increase in food production.
"The daunting task to feed the world, particularly in view of climate change and its overall negative effect on agricultural production, changes in pest and disease dynamics, increased risk to food and feed contaminated by mycotoxin producing fungi, and decline in nutritional quality of food crops, could be met using germplasm collections," he said.
Leading his team at International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) along with national partners, new sources of variation for traits of economic importance such as drought, salinity, diseases and desired agronomic attributes have been identified for economically important crops like chickpea, pigeon pea, groundnut, sorghum and millets.
This has resulted in enhanced use of germplasm in crop improvement programs in developing high yielding cultivars with a broad genetic base, ICRISAT said.
Upadhyaya's work places emphasis on exploring the use of crop wild relatives to enhance resistance to pest and diseases and for desired agronomic and nutritional traits, for use in crop improvement.
He sees the increased use of agrobiodiversity together with modern genomics tools as the best bet in coping with new challenges to agricultural production.
The Frank N Meyer Medal is presented in commemoration of Frank N Meyer, who served as agricultural explorer in the office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction in the US for outstanding achievements in the area of plant genetic resources.
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