AgroSpectrum - March 2021

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Genome Editing-Future ofIndia’s Agriculture Sector Over the years, India’s agriculture sector has gone through a lot of transformationfrom manual to digital, from animal-driven to tech-driven. All these alterations areintroduced to this sector in order to enhance productivity and reduce food loss.The biggest challenge before the country is its burgeoning population. To feed thismassive population, it has to keep innovating to increase its productivity. However,this quest of infusing more technology into agriculture to enhance the productionline, might witness a massive spike as Indian scientists and researchers are makingsuccessful inroads using gene-editing. Developing vitamin A-rich banana andimproved varieties of rice, millets, pulses and tomato are just the beginning. Geneticrestructuring of major food crops and horticultural plants by infusion of technologicalinnovations in plant breeding has played a key role in creating and sustaining theIndian and global food security. Dr Emmanuelle Charpentier and Dr Jennifer Doudnawere awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 for discovering one of genetechnology’s sharpest tools, the CRISPR-Cas9 genetic scissors. Researchers canuse these to change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremelyhigh precision. This research is considered as a game-changer in the agriculturalworld as it can improve yield, increase food diversity, improve nutrition, developdisease and pest resistance, control food waste and support sustainable agriculture.AgroSpectrum digs deep into the world of ‘Genome-Editing’ technology to analysehow it can alter, for the better, the entire face of the Indian Agriculture sector