Achievements

2018-19 RD Achievements

EUCALYPTUS:

1. Improve Eucalyptus camaldulensis wood yield by 20% with new clones and nutrient management (Business impact starting 2018). Status: 6 new Eucalyptus clones delivered to business are commercially deployed in 360 ha in mill core area. Post release survey is being carried out. 4 new clones brought to pre-commercial stage.
2. Eucalyptus: Hybrid clones with good wood and pulp yield traits (Business impact starting 2018). Status: Two new eucalyptus hybrids are ready & clonally multiplied to be released in this season (June 2019). 26 new Eucalyptus site-specific hybrids are in line for commercial introduction.
3. Eucalyptus: Genetic Modification for higher wood yield, pulp yield and reduced requirement for pulping chemicals. (Business impact starting 2026). Status: GE Eucalyptus lines are ready for trial in containment. Trial begins in July 2019. New gene candidates are identified for traits of interest. Gene editing carried out in model system for "Project Free" and is under testing in Eucalyptus.
4. Molecular Tree Breeding: Enabling early selections. Status: a) New Clones: Genomics selection methods ready for field deployment to predict WY, hybrid vigour and pulp quality in Eucalyptus. (Business impact: starting from 2022); b) Hybrids: A system to predict variability among hybrid seed lots identified (Business impact: starting from 2020); c) Resistance Breeding: Putative markers identified for borer insect resistance in E. urophylla and field testing is initiated (Business impact: Insurance on clone’s health).

CASUARINA:

1. Inland adaptability and coppicing with 75t/ha of wood yield (Business impact from 2020). Status: The new clone ITC 1761 with >30% higher yield than existing ruling varieties is distributed to 100ha (2018-19). Targeted further for 100ha (2019); multiplied in-advance and ready for distribution for Jun-Jul19 planting.
2. Clonal Mosaic (Business impact from 2024) : A new set of clones for inland sites were identified with 10% improved biomass and are being multiplied in translation centre for demonstration. The mosaic clones will be distributed to farmers from 2020.
3. Induction of coppicing ability (Business impact from 2024). Status: New clone (ITC 1761) is already showing 100% coppicing ability compared to existing commercial clones, besides, a new management practice was demonstrated to improve biomass yield by 25% in addition to coppicing.
4. Self fertigation in Casuarina (Business impact from 2022). Status: The microbial consortium of beneficial microbes that boosts sapling growth has been validated, beside adding tolerance to blister bark diseases. The consortium will be put in practice at production centre by 2020.
5. Popularization of Casuarina (Business impact from 2020). Status: (a) New chemical identified for inducing grazing tolerance, which reduces up to 60% of in intake in Sheep. (b) Developed a gypsum based treatment for salt stress and further suggested to farmers. (c) Implemented border planting of new clone (ITC 1761) in Mysuru region for popularization. (d) New demo plots have been established in Gudur (AP) and core area (Telangana) resulting in increased popularization of the new clone .
6. Debarking in Casuarina (Business impact from 2018). Status: Demonstrated the usefulness of mechanical debarked Casuarina (wood loss & chemical charging in digestion). Further, manual debarking ability and suitability for BCTMP is sought from business.

CORYMBIA:

1. Development of clones with pulp yield 52% (Business impact from 2024). Status: (a) Established Sand Bed Hedge using 1000 ramets of CH 436 at Kovai and 1000 ramets at BCM; (b) Seven thousand ramets are ready at Kovai nursery for planting and further multiplication is in progress to plant 50 acres in 2019 planting season.
2. Popularization of Corymbia hybrids: (Business impact from 2024). Status: (a) Established two 500 tree block planting demo plots at WG & OGL and one border planting demo at BCM with Clone CH436; (b) Clone Test Areas (CTAs') were raised using 25 Corymbia hybrid clones in Kovai, Ongole and Sangareddy (Hyd).
3. Corymbia: New hybrid clones with rooting efficiency of >60% (Business impact from 2024). Status: (a) CH 436 lateral cuttings rooting per cent has enhanced from 40% to 90% at Kovai; (b) An average 4 lateral shoots were produced / mother plant in fifteen days interval in translation centre.
4. Corymbia: High quality seeds on par with hybrid clones (Realised business impact starting 2024). Status: (a) Each 50 genotypes of C. Citriodora sps citriodora, C. Citriodora sps varigata and C. trolliana species outstanding trees were grafted and assembled at Kovai, RJY and OGL.; (b) Established Corymbia sps grafted orchard using 50 genotypes at Kovai to produce superior Corymbia hybrid seeds.

SUBABUL:

1. Standardise rooting rate (80%) for commercial production (Commercial supply in 2017). Status: 80% rooting was obtained in commercial clones by employing suitable protocols for maintaining mother plants. 15 lakh saplings of commercial clones were produced in 2018-19 in Laxmipuram nursery and supplied to farmers. Cost of production was maintained at Rs 4.5 per plant.
2. Subabul: Low lodging & 20% higher yielding clones (Commercial supply in 2018). Status: One lakh plants of two high yielding new clones were produced and supplied to farmers. 20,000 mother plants of the new clones were established in the translation centre for large scale multiplication.

PEST & DISEASE MANANGEMENT

1. To offer pest and disease free clones and eco-friendly management strategies. Satus: (a) New Eucalyptus clones were scrutinized for pest resistance and categorized; (b) All field managers have been trained in pest and disease management; (c) A kairamonal lure has been developed for preventing gall incidence in clonal plantations; (d) Tree health group is made operational for reporting pest and disease to get instant advice.

STRATEGIC CAPABILITY

1. Translation Centre (2018): A fully functional translation centre was established in BCM nursery to manage mother plants in sand beds of new Eucalyptus, Subabul and Casuarina clones and develop propagation protocols for commercial multiplication.
2. Epigenetic Platform: An epigenetic platform has been proposed to enhance the phenotypic plasticity of existing germplasm conserved in-situ in Kovai station and being utilized for various breeding programs.
3. Hybrid seed production for PSPD business: Large scale hybrid seed production through controlled pollination was taken up from grafts of E. camaldulensis, E. urophylla; Corymbia and Casuarina assembled in the station. The hybrids were assessed to give very high wood yield in the core area of the mill.
4. Informed breeding technologies: Predicted the phenotype using informed DNA marker tools involving high accuracy DNA markers in Eucalyptus, Corymbia and Casuarina as a global benchmark for precise prediction of invisible traits at early stages.

Bioinformatics

GENOMICS

1. Genome unique miner: (Business impact: Internal operational efficiency – ABD; ILTD and PSPD for multiple projects) A novel method / algorithm has been developed in-house to extract unique DNA fragments from the genome, which is useful for De-Tilling, genomic finger printing and identifying nicotine QTLs.
2. Skin microbiome is established (Business impact: PCPB in the new product category). Skin Microbiome is a workflow and successfully tested for new hand-wash product dataset.
3. Successful experimental validation of "insilico-workflow" on smallRNA design in tobacco and transformation is observed without any "off-target" effects. By utilizing genome information, we developed a high-end Bioinformatics capability to exactly target the trait specific smallRNAs / miRNAs.

VISUAL ANALYTICS:

1. IP Dashboard and IP classifier, a visual tracker platform has been developed for PCPB patents, designs and IP developments.
2. Downstream Proteomics: Functional identification of protein class w.r.t to its differential expression, hence the respective biomarkers for skin care program, which led to IP filings: IPO file No. 201841046895, Internal No. PD033027IN-SC.
3. Sentimental analytics (public opinion textual data mining) with statistical validation for the recent regulatory affairs data. (Business impact: ITD Team – risk planning)

CHEMINFORMATICS / METABOLOMICS:

1. 'Super Foods': (Business impact: Foods Team – new product category) New in silico method established to construct metabolite network for food / organic profiling to mimic the parent and final order derivatives in human biosystem. Successfully tested the method for 'Super Foods' project with different fruit juice sample metabolite profiling datasets.

Eucalyptus

1. BwB, selection accuracy and HD Maps

Casuarina

Casuarina: (Inland adaptability and coppicing with 75t/ha of wood yield - 2018): (a) Business demonstrated 5 new clones with >100% WY in costal and inland and are absorbed for fast-track commercialization by the business team, which observed one year advanced business delivery. (b) Demonstrated and obtained the business acceptance of a new management package for induction of coppicing ability. (c) Two kg of superior quality seeds have been delivered to business and strategic plans are in place to continuously improve the quality in future. (4) Developed new informed tools such as high density linkage maps, high accuracy DNA markers as a global benchmark for precise prediction of invisible traits at early stage to develop nextgen clones in Casuarina.

Corymbia

Development of high pulp yielding (52%) varieties (2021) with commercially deployable rooting efficiency: Status: (a) Demonstrated 1000 hybrids in field with 1 year performance on-par with E.camaldulensis, while a new set of of more than 3000 Corymbia inter-specific hybrids have been developed for field evaluation. (b) Identified a commercially deployable model for rooting in Corymbia hybrids. (c) A new set of high performance pure species were established as grafts for large scale controlled pollination orchard in Kovai breeding archive for future hybrid seed based commercialization of Corymbia.

Bioinformatics / Research Analytics

(a) New visual web based analytical tools such as Gendrome, Golyzer, Assaylyzer as a genome suite have been developed and deployed to users for minimising the operational complexity, which would potentially impact PSPD, ILTD, Food and PCB businesses. (b) A total of more than 0.25 million genomic variable regions have been identified across potential Tobacco genotypes to precisely breed for yield and quality traits.

2014-15 RD Achievements

File:RD Achievements 2014-15.pdf

2013-14 RD Achievements

File:RD Achievements 2013-14.doc