Hyderabad :

Two Icrisat scientists were selected for the institute’s highest award for research, its governing board announced on Tuesday. Dr Mamta Sharma and Dr Pooja Bhatnagar-Mathur are joint recipients of the Doreen Margaret Mashler Award, 2018, for significant work in their respective research fields at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).

Dr Mamta Sharma specializes in epidemiology of plant diseases and pathogens, focusing on disease-resistant breeding in chickpea and pigeonpea, two of ICRISAT’s mandate crops. In 2017, she led the team that developed the Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) method to identify a pathogen affecting chickpea and over 500 crops globally. She also established the Center of Excellence on Climate Change Research for Plant Protection to address effects of climate change on insect-pests and diseases.

Dr Sharma’s LAMP method has helped researchers in breeding programs across the globe understand the mechanism of inheritance of resistance.

Dr Pooja Bhatnagar-Mathur led an international, multiinstitutional effort, for innovative biotechnology solutions to combat aflatoxin in groundnut using a ‘double-defense’ approach. These include engineering groundnuts to stop Aspergillus flavus ungus by production of small proteins called defensins. In the second approach, the synthesis of aflatoxin by the fungus was shut down using gene-silencing RNA molecules. This breakthrough resulted in resistance to fungal infection as well as remarkably low levels of aflatoxin contamination.

Dr Bhatnagar-Mathur also worked towards successful isolation and characterization of the gene responsible for cytoplasmic male sterility in pigeonpea. As a result, ICRISAT filed its first ever patent in 2016-17. It holds great potential to induce and control male sterility in other crop species, providing male sterile lines for developing scalable hybrid systems.

The award, which includes a plaque and a citation, will be presented during the ICRISAT Governing Board meeting later this year.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Hyderabad News / by Sushil Rao / TNN / April 18th, 2018