Wheat

 

Work on wheat biotechnology is being directed towards obtaining transgenics with genes like bar for herbicide resistance, pin II for insect resistance and HVA1 for drought tolerance in bread and durum wheat. Towards enhancing the nutritional status of this important crop, a sub-project aimed at isolating the vitamin A & E biosynthetic pathway genes from wheat is also underway.  As wheat is a temperate crop, it is prone to heat stress during the grain filling stages, hence a program to understand the gene expression profile of wheat under heat stress, at different growth stages. Presently, focus is on understanding the molecular basis of heat tolerance in wheat using comparative genomic approaches.