In present scenario of increasing demand for food and climate change, ensuring food security is a ultimate challenge. Scientific community is working towards identifying stress related genes/proteins which could be exploited. But how? Are the Genetic transformation leading to GMOs acceptable?
For getting useful genes for plant one has to look for plants surviving in stress conditions and for that one has to leave the air conditioned office and explore the area let it be Rann of Kutch, Andaman and Nicobar, Bali island, Thar, Arunachal Pradesh and Ngaland etc. I request all the fine people working in finest conditions to think of tough areas and people working there without facilities. Till date how many GMO's are based upon indigenous genes does our country's genetic resources don't have genes of interest or our interest is not in those genes?
Another way can be why we always think of putting all the gene in rice or any other commercial crop? Why cant we think on domesticating and diversifying with complementing plant species I don't know how many ever thought of so called weeds to be excellent complementing source for resistance, nutrition, and capacity to adapt in climate change?
To identify relevant genes one has to understand fully the target environment one is focusing to improve the crop plants with. Even trying microbial sources from the stress environments could be tried.
Looking at recent changes of climate around the World, stress tolerance genes will be the most demanded for secure yield of strategic crops. And gene engineering is the only way to achieve the goal in reasonable time. Some new genes will have positive lateral effect as well. For instance, high proline content gives significant resistance to bacterial pathogens and oomycetes, besides the drought tolerance.
It is not clear how much of this gene hunt is realistic and how much of it is wishful thinking. Take salt tolerance in E.coli. Even if you try a thousand times with mutagens, you will not get a stable mutant. A gene that is expressed due to exposure to salt is not a saline tolerance gene. Drought tolerance, yield etc are polygenic quantitative traits for which a clear phenotype has not been defined. We can determine the phenotype for both drought and yield in a day at the seed level but all the agronomists want molecular markers which Monsanto keeps promising but never delivers. Yes there is a demand for stress tolerance phenotypes. But, stress tolerance genes, forget it. It is a pipe dream.
Dr. Sitaraman is quite right in fact breeders ultimately hunt for phenotype, and there is no stress in world which is monogenic, each species has its mechanism to tackle it and depends on the species what kind of package of genes nature has given it. Sometimes we think of transgens but what I feel if the recipient species does not have genes for harmony with external gene which depends upon synteny of sequences in question, it can not be expressed to desired level. Many wild species have mechanisms to tackle the stresses and its the associated cis or trans factors whom we reject in the name of linkage drag. So its the game of perfect permutations and combinations of what nature has delivered and what we can take out of it.
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