The Australian government has pledged $20 million for research work to be undertaken with India for improving the yield of food crops, developing new membranes for water desalination from carbon nanotubes and new materials and methods for separating hydrogen for future pollution-free fuels
Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and India’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) signed an agreement on Wednesday to implement the project over a period of five years. “The Australian government has decided to dole out $ 20 million under the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund (AISRF),” said the Australian High Commissioner to India, John McCarthy.
In 2001, the two institutions exchanged letters to signal their intent to build increased mutual understanding and awareness and in 2003 CSIR, CSIRO and seven other international research organisations together formed the Global Research Alliance. This alliance aims to facilitate international research cooperation in an effort to address the problems facing the developing world. The Indian Science and Technology Minister, Kapil Sibal visited Australia in February 2008 to discuss the modalities of further cooperation in research work.
The development of new methods in plant breeding that would lead to increased yield in food crops and also benefit farmers in developing countries. The findings pertain to methods for reducing the cost of commercial hybrid seed production and also allowing farmers to propagate their own hybrid seed by a process called apomixes, said the Director-General of CSIR, Samir K Brahmachari.
Recent efforts in several laboratories around the world to identify genes controlling apomixis have relied on mutation coupled with genetic screens in model plants such as Arabidopsis thaliana to look for mutants that show aspects of apomixis. The hypothesis here is that apomixis results from altered action of genes that function in the normal pathway of sexual development in plants (i.e. during meiosis, gamete formation, and fertilization). If this is the case then it may be possible to identify mutants whose features show aspects of apomixis. Such approaches have provided valuable clues about processes that may contribute to apomixis, however none of the mutants identified to date have been demonstrated to result in generation of a functional component of apomixis and the formation of viable seed that show aspects of apomixis.