Cisgenics â€" Sustainable Approaches for Crop improvement

Authors: Kumara Swamy R.V.(kumarabiotech@gmail.com) , Vijay Sharma, Ram Chandra Choudhry and S.G. Khandagale
Rajasthan College of Agriculture, Maharana Pratap University of Agriculture and Technology, Udaipur-313001.


The qualitative, safer and sufficient food productions are prime issues in the world wide. There is need of second green revolution to mitigate challenges existing in agriculture today like environmental stress, global warming, population growth and shrinking land resource. The advances in the Biotechnological tools in order to genetic enhancement cultivatable crop by introducing of novel genes isolated from non-crossable species, which possesses traits such as high yield, resistance to abiotic and biotic stress traits. Which stand testimony to the power of genetic engineering technology that ushered in green revolution and subsequently helped in the sustaining the production. However the testing, release and public acceptance of the genetically modified plants tightly regulated to monitoring the negative effect on the environments or human health. Recent progresses in the genome sequencing and Bioinformatics tools are facilitates the isolation of plant genes from crossable species. These genes are called cisgenes.

The concept of cisgenic was given by Schouten et al. 2006. Cisgenesis is described as specific alleles/genes in the breeder’s gene pool are introduced into new varieties without the accompanying linkage drag. Furthermore, cisgenic dived of foreign sequences including selectable marker gene, Vector backbone genes. The gene construct of cisgenic plants contains only endogenous gene including the promoter, intron, and terminator in the normal-sense orientation and except the T-DNA borders from Agrobacterium. There are, however now days suitable plant transfer DNAs (P-DNAs) resembles T-DNA borders of Agrobacterium which lacking the open reading frame and high A/T contents have been identified and isolated from the sexually compatible several species (Holme et al.2013). The P-DNA was successfully ligated into the backbone of a bacterial binary vector which were exploited in cisgenic plant development.

To, date several felid trails of cisgenic crop including vegetatively propagating , woody species, tree species, perennial grass and creals has been performed by the Europe, USA, and New Zealand with different traits like disease resistance, Quality improvement, Resistant plant to environmental stress. The crop obtains from cisgenic safer than the conventional bred (Lack of Linkage drag) hence it has been exempted from the regulatory frame work of GM technology. Anticipated that it may wipe out the uncertain outcomes and faceable in the public domain. Therefore, cisgenesis will play an important role in sustainable crop improvement.

References
Devi1 EL, Chongtham SK, Holeyachi1 P, Kousar N, Singh M, Behera C, Telem RS4, Singh NB, Wani SH (2013) Cisgenesis and Intragenesis: Twin Sisters for Crop Improvement. Research Journal of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences 1(10):22-26

Holme IB, Wendt T and Holm PB (2013) Intragenesis and cisgenesis as alternatives to transgenic crop development. Plant Biotechnology Journal. 11: 395â€"407

Hou H, Atlihan N and Lu Z (2014) New Biotechnology enhance the application of cisgenesis in plant breeding. Plant Genetics and Genomics 389(5):1-4

Schouten HJ, Krens FA and Jacobsen E (2006) Cisgenic plants are similar to traditionally bred plants: international regulations for genetically modified organisms should be altered to exempt cisgenesis. EMBO Rep 7: 750-753

Telem RS, Wani SH, Singh NB, Nandini R, Sadhukhan R, Bhattacharya S and Mandal N (2013) Cisgenic â€" A sustainable approach for crop improvement. Current Genomics 14:468-476

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