MOHALI, Punjab,<\/p>\n
( Justice News\u00a0 )<\/p>\n
There is a Hindi adage: Aql ki lauki. It translates roughly to “a gourd for a brain”, a playful way of calling someone foolish or empty-headed. The gourd, in popular imagination, is worthless. Hollow. Not to be taken seriously.<\/p>\n
But the gourd has been having the last laugh.<\/p>\n
Walk through most villages in North India during the growing season, and you will find them everywhere: bottle gourds, ridge gourds, bitter gourds, sponge gourds, snake gourds, climbing over bamboo trellises outside households. They are inexpensive, unattractive, and so common that no one gives them a second thought while purchasing them. Yet, nutritionally, they do a great deal of heavy lifting. They provide vitamins and minerals with almost no calories in a nation where rice and wheat may satisfy the stomach but still leave significant dietary gaps. Agricultural scientists have a term for crops such as these: “orphan crops”. Essential to the people who grow and consume them, they have been largely ignored for decades as breeders turned rice, wheat, cotton, and tomato into the high-yield varieties we know today.<\/p>\n
Here is the problem. Nearly all gourd species depend on insect pollinators to set fruit. A single vine produces tens or hundreds of male flowers for every one female flower, and only the female flowers develop into fruit. Even worse, that single female flower is typically receptive to pollen for only a few hours after opening, and it depends on bees to deliver the pollen. This pattern plays out across the gourd family: months of vigorous vegetative growth frequently yield a harvest disproportionately small for the plant’s effort.<\/p>\n
Think of it this way. We keep cows in our households for the milk they provide, not for the bull. But if most of our calves turned out to be bulls, we would have a problem. That is precisely the situation with gourds: too many male flowers, too few females. The plant invests heavily in male flowers that produce no fruit. For the farmer, it is a poor return on investment.<\/p>\n
Dr Ravi Devani’s team at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali, in collaboration with Dr Bendahmane’s research group at the Institute of Plant Sciences, Paris-Saclay, France, is now striving to alter that arithmetic. Rather than using more fertilizer or pesticide, they intend to understand and rewrite the genetic instructions that determine whether a flower ends up male or female. Their first focus is the bottle gourd. It has a fully mapped genome and a proven technique for inserting new genetic instructions, making it the most practical starting point for tackling a problem that affects its less-studied relatives.<\/p>\n
Consider how hybrid seeds are made today. To produce improved varieties, seed companies manually cross two parent plants, taking pollen from a male flower on one plant and transferring it to a female flower on another, one by one. The process is slow and labour-intensive. The cost is passed on to the seed packet. Many years ago, breeders of melons and cucumbers solved this problem by creating plant lines that are almost entirely female, like a dairy herd with mostly cows, not bulls. Fewer male flowers, more fruit. Nobody has achieved this in Indian gourds. Yet.
\nPollination itself is also an issue, and climate change will only make it worse. For a plant that relies on a short pollination window and a willing insect, heat waves and falling bee numbers are both bad news. The researchers are pursuing two different solutions.<\/p>\n
Imagine a flower that is both male and female at the same time, self-sufficient, requiring no partner, no insect, no pollen transfer. That is, hermaphrodite plants, in which flowers have both male and female parts in the same flower, allowing the plant to fertilise itself without an insect. Another, more radical solution is ‘parthenocarpy’, literally ‘virgin fruit’. Parthenocarpy is the ability to produce fruit without fertilisation. A parthenocarpic vine does not require a bee to be present on time: no pollination, no bees, no problem. Whether one method is used or both combined, these crops would become much less susceptible to a hot afternoon or a poor bee season. Both strategies have been demonstrated in other crops but not yet in Indian gourds.<\/p>\n
Over a couple of decades of careful research, Dr Bendahmane and Dr Devani identified the genetic switches that control flower sex, one gene at a time, in melon and cucumber. They published their findings in journals such as Science, Nature, and Nature Plants. But it remains unknown whether bottle gourd and its relatives use the same switches or have developed their own.<\/p>\n
Bottle gourd and cucumber last shared a common ancestor tens of millions of years ago, long before humans even existed. In all that time, their genetic instructions have drifted apart. So the switch that works in cucumber may not work in bottle gourd. The project will involve raising a large number of bottle gourd plants whose genes have been deliberately altered, not with chemicals or radiation, but with meticulous tools that can turn specific genes on or off. Scientists will observe these genetically mutated plants over several growing seasons, searching for the rare vine that breaks the pattern on its own.<\/p>\n
The scientists emphasise that bottle gourd is intended to be a test case, a way to prove the method works before applying it to other gourds. Since the crop has never had a sex-determination-specific breeding programme before, one is now going to be started. If it proves successful, the same tools will be applied to bitter gourd, ridge gourd, sponge gourd, and other members of the family, all of which are grown by the same smallholder communities. For farming families who have, through the generations, consistently harvested only a modest fraction of the fruits their vines produce relative to the hundreds of flowers, such a change would be a genuinely welcome improvement.<\/p>\n
After all, a gourd with a brain, or at least with a few more female flowers, is no longer something to be laughed at.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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