Aakancha Shaw, St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata
Researchers discovered a new approach to cereal plant breeding that makes them continuously reorganize themselves (global coherence) and takes into account the internal ‘calculator’ of plant seeds.
The approach basically includes unintended changes in the plant when genetically manipulated by the plant breeders. It is expected that the method can be used to improve the world’s crops much more efficiently.
The research shows how mutation in a single gene changes the entire chemical composition of nutrients in a barley grain.
And with the help of a non-destructive green analysis method and NIRS- near-infrared spectroscopy, we can get an overview of the process which is not possible in the case of the conventional method of plant breeding where an overview of the changes that the barley grain undergoes when a gene is modified is not known.
By using NIRS, researchers were able to provide a “chemical fingerprint” of the barley grains within seconds, this could describe the Physico-chemical composition of the grains as well as the nutrients.
Scientists were surprised at the precision of the technique and how the same results were obtained when the same experiment was carried out by a more complicated technique. This implied that all fingerprints (local) affect the plant’s overall chemical-physical fingerprints and are a part of its self-organizing network.
One of the barley lines was examined and found to have a higher content of the amino acid lysine(essential amino acid), compared to normal barley. With the high content of lysine, the yield in the field was horrible with low starch content. However, it gave good growth in feeding studies with pigs.
By the analysis of high-lysine content barley lines that were crossed with high starch content, barley lines showed high yield, and by the use of measurements of NIRS fingerprints, we could select lines with a high content of both lysine and starch, which thus gave higher yields and proved to be beneficial.
When looking for an expression for an entire organism, using NIRS fingerprints provided a more nuanced result that allows one to examine the overall chemical composition of an organism rather than examining each gene combination separately. With this new method, the large knowledge gap that exists in the genetics between genotype and phenotype could be eradicated efficiently.
The introduction of macroscopic chemical fingerprint coherence that coordinates morphological structures with chemical is of utmost importance.
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Reference: Physiological Genetics Reformed: Bridging the Genome-to-Phenome Gap by Coherent Chemical Fingerprints – the Global CoordinatorMunck, Lars et al.Trends in Plant Science, Volume 26, Issue 4, 324 – 337 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2020.12.014
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