Khalsa College seminar mulls cane quality, yield

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, April 12

A seminar on ‘traditional and non-traditional approaches to sugarcane improvement’ was organised recently at Khalsa College. The main objective of the seminar was to make the students and faculty aware about the new research and attempts in improving the sugarcane crop with the use of traditional and biotechnological techniques for high yields.

Director-cum-principal and sugarcane breeder from Punjab Agriculture University’s Regional Research Centre, Kapurthala, Dr Gulzar Singh Sanghera was the keynote speaker while Cane Commissioner, Punjab, Rajesh Kumar Raheja, Assistant Cane Commissioner Punjab and SS Bajwa were the special guests. They focused on the early ripening of sugarcane, resistance to lodging, resistance to stressful environments, disease resistance, insect resistance and juice quality components as key subjects. They added that this system has been adopted to improve sugarcane quality and production and isolate yield, sugar recovery, disease resistance, drought tolerance and maturity.

Dr Sanghera said that inter-specific hybridisation resulted in high polyploidy and aneuploidy in modern sugarcane varieties. “The estimated genome size of sugarcane is 10 gbp, in which up to 10-12 allelic forms of genes are present. The estimated monoploid genome size is around 800-900 mb, which depends on several types of levels. The drought-tolerant sugarcane varieties can withstand water stress up to 36 days and yield significantly higher than the control variety BL-19 under drought stress,” he said.

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