The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India, are joining hands to establish a Centre of Excellence in Genomics (CEG) at ICRISAT. A Memorandum of Agreement on the Centre was signed recently by Dr. William Dar, Director General of ICRISAT, and Dr. M.K. Bhan, Secretary of DBT. The Project would help alleviate the poverty of smallholder farmers in the dry land areas of India and rest of world. The CEG would provide new technological options, build capacity of scientists and also accelerate crop improvement by halving the time required to develop new varieties. The facility, which is expected to be fully operational over the course of 2007, would be available for researchers from other agricultural research institutes. The CEG would provide : facilities for high-throughput, low-cost, allele detection platforms to help with molecular marker-assisted selection and breeding; access to large-scale field screening for abiotic stresses such as drought and salinity; biometrics and bioinformatics support; and fellowships and training courses for scientists and students from the Indian Institutes in the use of high throughput methods in breeding and research. The partnership is significant since it links international research and national research.

Source: www.checkbiotech.org