November 1, 2005
Agriculture in the
developing world: Connecting innovations in plant research to
downstream applications
Deborah P. Delmer, Food
Security, the Rockefeller Foundation
Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
ABSTRACT
Enhancing agricultural
productivity in those areas of the world bypassed by the Green
Revolution will require new approaches that provide incentives
and funding mechanisms that promote the translation of new
innovations in plant science into concrete benefits for poor
farmers. Through better dialogue, plant breeders and laboratory
scientists from both the public and private-sectors need to find
solutions for the key constraints to crop production, many of
which center around abiotic and biotic stresses. The revolution
in plant genomics has opened up new perspectives and
opportunities for plant breeders who can now apply molecular
markers to assess and enhance diversity in their germplasm
collections, to introgress valuable traits from new sources, and
to identify genes that control key traits. Functional genomics
is also providing another powerful route to the identification
of such genes. The ability to introgress beneficial genes under
the control of specific promoters through transgenic approaches
is yet one more stepping stone in the path to targeted
approaches to crop improvement, and the new sciences have
identified a vast array of genes that have exciting potential
for crop improvement. For a few crops with viable markets, such
as maize and cotton, some of the traits developed by the private
sector are already showing benefits for farmers of the
developing world, but the public sector will need to develop new
skills and overcome a number of hurdles to carry out similar
efforts for other crops and traits useful to very poor farmers.
ARticle:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/102/44/15739 |