Hyderabad, India
June 12, 2006
Source:
The Financial Express via
Checkbiotech
By BV Mahalakshmi
Looking at the ongoing tussle between the farmers and the seed
companies over spurious seeds, the
Central Institute for Cotton Research (CICR), Nagpur, has
developed a Bt detection kit which will cost Rs 1,300. The
institute is in contact with farmers’ associations through local
coordinators for selling the kits.
The kit involves a simple
procedure wherein a ‘Cry1Ac Bt instant check strip’ with a
purple colour band is dipped in a little extraction of a seed.
If one band develops halfway through the strip along with
another at the top (two bands), it indicates the presence of
Cry1Ac protein in the sample. Thus, the Bt cotton sample with
the particular gene is tested positive or negative.
All India Crop Biotech Association executive director RK Sinha
said now farmers in different mandals could make use of the kit
free of cost. Mr Sinha said though India had the largest area in
the world under cotton cultivation — 22.5 million acres — it
remained third in terms of total cotton production.
The institute has developed three kits for testing the
expression of various Bt toxins in plants. These kits help in
quality assurance during transgenic seed production and
large-scale screening of plants to assess the expression of
gene. Cry I Ac (crystal-toxin 1Ac), Cry 1Ab or Cry 1Aa proteins
are also being expressed in transgenic crop plant developed for
insect pest management.
© 2006 Indian Express
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