A new, early-maturing, quality protein maize hybrid developed by the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) could provide small-scale farmers with bigger harvests and better nutritional quality. Raman Babu, the maize breeder who developed the new hybrid using a combination of biotechnology and conventional methods, hopes it will improve livelihoods and food security in the northwestern hills of India, where many depend on maize as a staple.

“Quality protein maize grain has almost twice the lysine and tryptophan of normal maize,” says Babu, who works at ICAR’s Vivekananda Institute of Hill Agriculture, in Almora, Uttaranchal State, India. “The higher levels of those amino acids make more of the grain’s protein useful to humans and farm animals.”

Quality protein maize was developed by CIMMYT in the 1980s using conventional breeding methods. In 2001, Babu crossed lines of this maize with the parents of a popular, normal hybrid, Vivek Hybrid-9, already grown by farmers in nine states of India. He then used molecular markers—DNA signposts for genes of interest—to quickly select the progeny that contained both the desirable parentage of the original hybrid plus the quality protein trait. For this effort, CIMMYT provided donor lines, the methodology, molecular markers, and technical guidance along the way.

“Using this approach, we were able to develop the quality protein maize hybrid in less than half the time it would have taken using only conventional selection methods,” Babu says. After passing national trials in the next one or two years, the new hybrid should be available to farmers at a nominal cost from government agencies that produce the seed.

“The potential for this new hybrid is good, because it’s the only early-maturing, yellow grain, quality protein maize available and has all the desirable characteristics of Vivek Hybrid-9,” he says. In demonstration plantings, the new hybrid produced more than double the state averages of local and open pollinated varieties. The slightly different combination of parent lines used means that the new hybrid yields even more than the original. “This is extraordinary, because we’d tried unsuccessfully for years to develop something that could outyield Vivek Hybrid-9,” says Babu.