ICRISAT, DowDuPont sign agreement to share technology

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and Corteva Agriscience, the agriculture division of DowDuPont, inked a multilayer partnership Master Alliance Agreement (MAA) on Thursday for sharing and utilising CRISPR/Cas and allied technologies for precision-breeding of agricultural crops. Once fine-tuned, these crop technologies would be made available as public goods through national and State agricultural partners and universities.

The Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) is a genome editing tool that has been revolutionising various sectors, including medical and farm sectors by removing or adding or altering parts of DNA.

The agreement was signed by ICRISAT Director General (Acting) Peter Carberry and Tom Greene, senior research director, Corteva Agriscience. Technology-sharing includes CRISPR-Cas gene editing, adopting transformation techniques to ICRISAT mandate crops and applying knowledge of plant biochemical pathways for crop improvement.

DuPont Pioneer, now part of Corteva Agriscience, would provide access to intellectual property, material and the know-how related to CRISPR-Cas and plant transformation.

“While DuPont has been working in the field for the past nine decades, we are working for the past four-and-a-half decades and we know the needs of small farmers in India and sub-Saharan Africa. Technology-sharing will significantly reduce the breeding cycle to three to four years, and better varieties of seed will be made available for the farming community thereby transforming the lives of millions of farmers and strengthening food security systems,” said Dr. Carberry while speaking to the reporters here.

Dr. Carberry, also the director of Global CGIAR Research Programme on Grain Legumes and Dryland Cereals (GLDC), said both the organisations would focus on developing innovative technologies and translating these in farmers’ fields thereby benefiting the smallholding agriculture.

Mr. Greene said Corteva Agriscience was a global leader in innovation and and the CRISPR-Cas technology would have a huge positive impact on farmers.

Pooja Bhatnagar-Mathur, principal investigator at ICRISAT, said, “Scientists now do have better understanding of genomes of several crops and by using modern methods, they are able to identity genes.”

“In layman’s language, researchers can now develop plant traits that are faster, more precise, easier, and in most cases cheaper than either traditional breeding techniques. These futuristic technologies will allow precise and targeted genomic changes in crops and complement the existing breeding systems to provide with greater environmental resiliency, productivity and sustainability,” Kiran K. Sharma, Deputy Director General- Research (Acting) told The Hindu.