Publications of NIPGR Scientists
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Item The #semantic climate community: making open-source software for knowledge liberation(NATL INST SCIENCE COMMUNICATION-NISCAIR, 2024) Yadav, Gitanjali; Hegde, Shweata; Kumari, Renu; Kumari, Neeraj; Murray-Rust, Peter; Worthington, Simon#semantic Climate is an international open research community led by young Indian scientists who use Open Notebook Science to transform information into structured filtered and actionable knowledge. The key project mission is to liberate scientific climate data, making it equitable and freely accessible to everyone. The #semantic Climate community achieves this through two central activities, namely collaborative open notebook science, and citizen engagement. The first activity is research oriented and involves creation of a proof-of-concept software toolkit that uses AI over NLP to transform locked literature (such as PDF documents) into semantic, hypermedia form. This is a non-trivial task, that has haunted developers for over three decades, and the #semantic Toolkit makes complex climate reports not just easily accessible, but also processable by machines, embedded in the Global Knowledge Graph and thereby connected to multilingual resources. The second activity is where the #semantic Climate community engages citizens in climate action and awareness through interactive hackathons, open and transparent working practices, and using Git versioning. From a citizen science perspective, this includes designing community outreach activities (games), giving attribution to all participants, and engaging the wider public in the culture and practices of science (verifiable knowledge, review, data science, modern infrastructure use, etc). This article is an overview of the #semantic Climate community building efforts, and how the project employs strategies, techniques, and ideas from the fields of Open Notebook Science. The open-source software culture and projects follow UNESCO Open Science values, and knowledge justice for the Global South, towards addressing knowledge neo-colonisation.Item Stress combinations and their interactions in crop plants(Springer Nature Publishing AG, 2024) Ramegowda, Venkategowda; Senthil, Alagarswamy; Senthil‑Kumar, MuthappaCombined stresses are a common occurrence in agricultural felds. There is a pressing need for empirical understanding of the plant responses and fnd ways to develop stress tolerant plants and stress management strategies to tackle combined stresses in the feld conditions. Here a comprehensive overview of the current understating and recent research on combined stress interactions in plants are presented. Here we comprehend the fndings from various studies focusing on diferent aspects of combined stress, including abiotic-abiotic, abiotic-biotic, and biotic-biotic stress interactions. In general, the studies discussed here highlight the escalating impact of climate change on plants, emphasizing the need for a deeper understanding of plant responses to concurrent abiotic and biotic stresses. Key fndings from the articles published in this issue, include the adverse efects of combined drought and high-temperature stress on crop growth and yield, the exacerbation of pathogen impacts under abiotic stresses, and the potential for melatonin and salicylic acid to mitigate stress-induced damage. Additionally, use of model systems for quicker understanding of combined stress responses and development of methods and technologies which can be extrapolated to crop plants are discussed. Overall, fndings from the articles from this special issue underscore the complexity of combined stress interactions in plants and highlight the importance of interdisciplinary research eforts to address the challenges posed by climate change and ensure global food security.Item Biotechnological strategies to generate climate-smart crops: Recent advances and way forward(John Wiley & Sons, 2023) Maurya, Jyoti; Singh, Roshan Kumar; Prasad, ManojIndustrialization and other man-made actions caused accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmospheric troposphere layer, leading to enhanced greenhouse effect and hike in average global temperature in response. This led to unpredicted and frequent occurrences of rainfall, droughts, floods, and other climatic events. Changing climate has imposed direct abiotic stresses leading severe threat to global crop production either directly (morpho-physio-chemical effects) or indirectly (socioeconomic effects) and caused food insecurity worldwide. Moreover, these climate change effects are predicted to become more severe in the future. So, to ensure the global food security, development of climate-smart crops is an urgent need. Biotechnology-based approaches have paved the way to understand the role of different genes and their applications to achieve climate change induced stress tolerance and developed crops for sustainable agriculture in the present scenario. Keeping this in mind, the present book chapter briefs about the effect of climate change on crop growth, development, and yield, as well as plant responses and adaptations during changing environments. This chapter also discusses different strategies implied to combat the climate change and highlights the integrative-omics based approach and biotechnological strategies, as well as their advancements toward generating the climate-smart crops.Item Understanding abiotic stress responses in lentil under changing climate regimes(Springer Nature Publishing AG, 2023) Singh, Baljinder; Padhy, Asish Kumar; Ambreen, Heena; Yadav, Manisha; Bhardwaj, Shubham; Singh, Gourav; Pandey, Vimal; Chakraborty, Anirban; Bhatia, SabhyataLentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) is a cool-season grain legume crop that is mainly cultivated across the semi-arid regions of Australia, South Asia, Africa, and North America. The crop is highly valued for its nutritional attributes such as dietary proteins (22–35%), carbohydrates, minerals, and fiber that play a significant role in alleviating malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies across populations in developing countries. The last five decades have seen an upward trend in global production of lentils from 0.85 to 5.73 Mt. suggesting its increasing demand and utilization. However, various abiotic stresses such as drought, heat, cold, salinity, and nutrient deficiency impose severe threats to the global lentil yield and productivity. The current book chapter is an attempt to comprehend the morpho-physiological and biochemical changes occurring during these stresses and the developmental plasticity shown by the plant to counteract them. Furthermore, the current status of research focusing on the development of novel molecular and functional markers/tags, identification of candidate genes/QTLs responsible for abiotic stress tolerance, the intervention of high throughput genotyping and phenotyping platforms, development of populations and linkage maps, and omics studies have been discussed. Some tolerant germplasm and varieties developed through conventional and next-generation breeding approaches are also enlisted making the book chapter a concise platform for reports of abiotic stress tolerance in lentils.Item The promise of millets in the twenty-first century: emphasis on breeding, nutrition, food security and sustainability(Springer Nature Publishing AG, 2023) Bandyopadhyay, Tirthankar; Singh, Roshan Kumar; Ramesh, Palakurthi; Maurya, Jyoti; Prasad, ManojGlobal population is expected to cross 11 billion by the turn of the century, which has put immense pressure on the existing agricultural systems worldwide. This is complicated by gradually decreasing productivity and acreage as a result of climate change in addition to ever-increasing input costs of resource hungry staple crops like rice, wheat, and maize. Unfortunately, the most affected by these events are those who have the least resources at their disposal to mitigate the issue, especially in countries of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. It is therefore pertinent to explore and adopt alternative and/or complementary crops that are easier to cultivate, climate change tolerant, less resource hungry, nutritionally richer for human consumption, and agriculturally sustainable. Millets are perfect cereal crops which meet all of these requirements and can realistically provide much-needed solutions to current global food and nutritional security challenges. In this review, we provide a bird’s eye view of the relevance of millets in global agro-ecosystems in the context of their nutritional and agronomic attributes. Furthermore, we share perspectives on the major areas of crop improvement programs worldwide and discuss major challenges confronting the same. Finally, we discourse on the scope of millets for wider acceptability and highlight major points at the interface of genetic intervention–crop management post-harvest practices worth considering to potentially facilitate robust millet-based nutritional and food security.Item Gene pyramiding in transgenic plant development: Approaches and challenges(Springer Nature Publishing AG, 2023) Rajput, Ruchika; Naik, Jogindra; Misra, Prashant; Trivedi, Prabodh Kumar; Pandey, AshutoshClimate change leads to frequent alterations in environmental factors with a reciprocal impact on crop productivity. Over the last few decades, various approaches have been used for producing more stress-tolerant and climate-flexible crops. Genetic engineering is one of the approaches used to modify multiple characters or to improve more than one agronomic trait in plants. These instances simultaneously demand simultaneous genetic manipulation of multiple genes, necessitating stacking or pyramiding of multiple genes as compared to single-gene manipulations, and the genetic engineering of plants using multiple genes is technically challenging. In the last two decades, considerable progress has been made with respect to the development and application of the methods for gene pyramiding in transgenic context. The conventional methods of gene stacking include the crossing of individual transgenic plants, co-transformation using multiple plant expression constructs, transformation with single constructs carrying multiple transgenes as well as with the constructs carrying polycistronic transgenes. These methods have been instrumental for gene stacking in several commercialized crops. The tools of targeted genome editing (ZFN, TALEN, and CRISPR) that carry out precise genetic modifications, have opened new avenues in the area of crop biotechnology for defending plants against various stresses. The present review covers the current status of biotechnological techniques used to combat biotic and abiotic stresses in crop plants and describes multiple associated challenges.Item Plant-virus-abiotic stress interactions: A complex interplay(Elsevier B.V., 2022) Prasad, Ashish; Sett, Susmita; Prasad, ManojUnder field conditions, plants are subjected to a wide array of biotic and abiotic stresses. These are detrimental to the survival of plants and adversely affects global crop productivity. Changing climate has led to elevated temperatures and unpredicted whether patterns across the world leading to suboptimal crop performance. This is coupled by the emergence of novel pathogen strains which are resistant to anti-pathogenic agents. The situation is even worse in case of viruses where antiviral agents for controlling viral diseases in plants is lacking. The explosion of international trade has helped in the sharing of surplus resources from one location to the other and benefitted the economy of most countries however, this has also resulted in the spread of viruses and other pathogens. Recent years have seen a paradigm shift in the research methodology with combined stress gaining major attention instead of solitary stress. Viruses influence a plant’s response to various abiotic stresses, similarly, abiotic stress imposition has a great effect on viral disease progression. The recent developments associated with plant-virus-abiotic stress interactions along with the way forward to tackle such stresses has been discussed in the present review.Item Biotechnological approaches to dissect climate-resilient traits in millets and their application in crop improvement(Elsevier B.V., 2021) Singh, Roshan Kumar; Muthamilarasan, Mehanathan; Prasad, Manoj'Small millets' is a generic term that includes all the millets except pearl millet and sorghum. These small or minor millets constitute eleven species that are marginally cultivated and consumed worldwide. These small millets possess excellent agronomic-, climate-resilient, and nutritional traits, although they lack popularity. Small millets withstand a broad spectrum of environmental stresses and possess better water-use and nitrogen-use efficiencies. Of note, small millets are five- to seven-fold nutritionally rich in terms of protein, bioactive compounds, micro- and macro-nutrients as compared to major cereals. Irrespective of these merits, small millets have received little research attention compared to major millets and cereals. However, the knowledge generated from such studies is significant for the improvement of millets per se and for translating the information to improve major cereals through breeding and transgene-based approaches. Given this, the review enumerates the efforts invested in dissecting the climate-resilient traits in small millets and provides a roadmap for deploying the information in crop improvement of millets as well as cereals in the scenario of climate change.Item Multi-omics approaches for strategic improvement of stress tolerance in underutilized crop species: A climate change perspective(Elsevier B.V., 2019) Muthamilarasan, Mehanathan; Singh, Nagendra Kumar; Prasad, ManojFor several decades, researchers are working toward improving the “major” crops for better adaptability and tolerance to environmental stresses. However, little or no research attention is given toward neglected and underutilized crop species (NUCS) which hold the potential to ensure food and nutritional security among the ever-growing global population. NUCS are predominantly climate resilient, but their yield and quality are compromised due to selective breeding. In this context, the importance of omics technologies namely genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, phenomics and ionomics in delineating the complex molecular machinery governing growth, development and stress responses of NUCS is underlined. However, gaining insights through individual omics approaches will not be sufficient to address the research questions, whereas integrating these technologies could be an effective strategy to decipher the gene function, genome structures, biological pathways, metabolic and regulatory networks underlying complex traits. Given this, the chapter enlists the importance of NUCS in food and nutritional security and provides an overview of deploying omics approaches to study the NUCS. Also, the chapter enumerates the status of crop improvement programs in NUCS and suggests implementing “integrating omics” for gaining a better understanding of crops' response to abiotic and biotic stresses.Item Climate change and crop breeding objectives in the twenty first century(Indian Academy of Sciences, 2006) Kumar, SushilThe earth’s climate system is experiencing a warmer phase. Concomitantly, India is facing a climate change of considerable magnitude. Recently, researchers have projected region-wise scenarios of rainfall and temperature changes, impact on hydrology of river basins and conse- quences for India in the twenty-first century respectively