UoH, ILS and NIPGR join hands to improve nutritional value of millets

Hyderabad: Three institutions including University of Hyderabad, Institute of Life Sciences (ILS), Bhubaneswar and National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR) have joined hands to collaborate in the field of improving nutritional value of cereals and minor millets. As part of this effort, researcher from UoH, Dr. M Muthamilarasan, Dr. Ajay Parida from Institute of […]

Hyderabad: Three institutions including University of Hyderabad, Institute of Life Sciences (ILS), Bhubaneswar and National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR) have joined hands to collaborate in the field of improving nutritional value of cereals and minor millets. As part of this effort, researcher from UoH, Dr. M Muthamilarasan, Dr. Ajay Parida from Institute of Life Sciences (ILS), Bhubaneswar and Dr. Manoj Prasad from NIPGR have drafted a roadmap to address the ongoing issues of food and nutritional insecurities.

The researchers, whose work is available in online journals SpringerLink and ScienceDirect, advocated approaches requiring collaborative efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG-2). There was a need to broaden the food base to integrate several other crop species, especially indigenous species that were neglected and underutilised, they said. The researchers also highlighted the importance of small millets that are nutritionally superior to rice, wheat, and maize. The researchers presented a roadmap to mainstream small millet species that were predominantly consumed by our ancestral population but have now been produced at marginal levels.

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There is a need to have collaborative effort to use next-generation genomics approaches to study the genetic determinants of micronutrient traits in small millets and devise appropriate strategies to use this information in developing bio-fortified varieties suitable for cultivation by Indian farmers, the researchers said.

The links to publications: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00122-021-03878-z and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1360138520302557

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