One purpose may very well be that the speed of yield enhance just isn’t compensated by the speed of nutrient uptake by vegetation
Rice, domesticated by people over 10,000 years in the past has now grow to be the staple meals for greater than three billion individuals. But at present’s rice doesn’t have the identical density of important vitamins as these cultivated 50 years in the past, notes a brand new examine. Researchers from numerous institutes underneath the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya discovered depleting tendencies in grain density of zinc and iron in rice and wheat cultivated in India. The findings had been printed final month in Environmental and Experimental Botany.
The crew collected seeds of rice (16 varieties) and wheat (18 varieties) from the gene financial institution maintained on the ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Chinsurah Rice Research Station and ICAR-Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research.
Cultivar repositories
“These are nodal institutes that preserve and archive the old cultivars or varieties from our country. These institutes are repositories of genetic materials. If you want to study the genuine variety, or as botanists call them, ‘the true type’ of a plant, these institutes are your source,” explains Professor Biswapati Mandal from the Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya, West Bengal, and one of many corresponding authors of the paper.
The collected seeds had been germinated within the laboratory, sown in pots and stored underneath an ambient surroundings outside. They had been handled with the required fertilizers and the post-harvest seeds had been studied for their nutrient content material.
Falling vitamins
The crew famous that zinc and iron concentrations in grains of rice cultivars launched within the Nineteen Sixties had been 27.1 mg/kg and 59.8 mg/kg. This depleted to twenty.6 mg/kg and 43.1 mg/kg, respectively within the 2000s. In wheat, the concentrations of zinc and iron — 33.3 mg/kg and 57.6 mg/kg in cultivars of the Nineteen Sixties, dropped to 23.5 mg/kg and 46.4 mg/kg, respectively in cultivars launched in the course of the 2010s.
Sovan Debnath, the primary writer of the paper explains: “There could be several possible reasons for such depletion: one is a ‘dilution effect’ that is caused by decreased nutrient concentration in response to higher grain yield. This means the rate of yield increase is not compensated by the rate of nutrient take-up by the plants. Also, the soils supporting plants could be low in plant-available nutrients.” He is a doctoral researcher at Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya and a scientist for ICAR.
“Zinc and iron deficiency affects billions of people globally and the countries with this deficiency have diets composed mainly of rice, wheat, corn, and barley. Though the Indian government has taken initiatives such as providing supplementation pills to school children, it is not enough. We need to concentrate on other options like biofortification, where we breed food crops that are rich in micronutrients,” he provides.
Not sustainable
The paper concludes that “growing newer-released (1990s and later) cultivars of rice and wheat cannot be a sustainable option to alleviate zinc and iron malnutrition in Indian population. These negative effects need to be circumvented by improving the grain ionome (that is, nutritional make-up)…while releasing cultivars in future breeding programmes”
