Temp

What RDC will deliver?

What way R&D in totality has contributed to realising project objectives?

• New approaches adopted by R&D
  • Quick screening of trees using NIR has helped to select trees for Pulp yield apart from growth traits.
  • Molecular markers will be used to select trees for PY and drought tolerance for establishing seedling seed orchards.
  • High pulp yielding hybrids would be produced by accessing Hybridising orchards developed by CSIR, South Africa.
• Realized benefits
  • R&D will deliver large number of new high yielding clones on par with the existing ITC clones – by 2013
  • R&D will develop high pulp yielding clones from the new selections by 2013
  • R&D will demonstrate the superiority of the new clones in an area of 500 ha by 2013
  • R&D will develop a package of practice for enhancing wood yield over 20% compared to the existing practice thereby shortening one year in harvest cycle of 4 years.
• Sustainable benefits for the future
  • R&D will establish site-specific seed orchards, for the sustainable improvement of wood and pulp yield

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Tobacco

Dear All,

Everyone might be aware that I am working on CMS diversification in Tobacco, which primarily involves, developing hybrids from wild species. It was extremely encouraging, while looking at the hybrid seed/seedlings that were made with cultivated and 5 different wild species. Today we have ~3000 hybrids, more than 95% of which shows array of interesting variation at seedling level.

Often I hear a chat around in the center, what if we fail to deliver flavor? Well,

Due to conservative breeding methods used in the development of tobacco cultivars resulted in only a small portion of the germplasm pool being utilized as a parental material for new crosses. Ex. ILTD team selected 50 flue cured cultivars, released a very good varieties and hybrids out of it and this resulted in loosing >75% of allelic diversity in recent Past. Now that flue-cured out dated cultivars would no longer to consider as adequate breeding material. It looks like introduction of atleast 700 accession from NC would harbor favorable alleles for further desired genetics- based modification of our trait of interest majorly a FLAVOR. It would even generate a core collection of tobacco germplasm.

I knew people would come back to comment, "you might loose focus on CMS", but my model prioritise CMS, while still "explores additional value" to the most precise germplasm, with the little additional effort of course.