Hyderabad University now has an automated DNA sequencing facility at its Plant Molecular Genetics and Functional Genomics Laboratory. The facility for the use of the university and researchers in the fields of agriculture, industry and pharmaceuticals, was inaugurated by Vice-Chancellor Kota Harinarayana. The facility has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation as a research grant to Arjula R Reddy, Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences for Rice Gene Discovery.
Inaugurating the new facility, the vice-chancellor referred to the recent talk of the President of India, Dr A P J Abdul Kalam, on green revolution, and said the university would provide quality leadership in the national endeavour of developing and using such powerful technologies to usher in the new Green Revolution in India. He asked the Life Sciences faculty to strive hard to maintain very high standards of research and aim at critical science areas for improvement of human life.
Prof. T Satyanarayana, Dean, School of Life Sciences, said that various research projects taken up at the school would have a longstanding impact on human health, agriculture and the pharma industry.
The laboratory was adapting novel strategies using molecular and genomic technologies to elucidate the role of genes involved in drought tolerant rice varieties. Their ongoing work funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, USA, focuses on improving rice for its response to drought situation. Recently the research team made a high quality non-redundant coding GeneBank of rice consisting of more than 20,000 clones from drought stressed rice leaves. Of these 3,000 clones were sequenced and stored in GeneBank for global usage and are easily accessible to the scientific community all over the world.
Prof Reddy's lab is one of the few labs in the country equipped with full-fledged infrastructure for advanced research in the areas of functional genomics and bioinformatics. The lab is providing high quality training in frontier areas of functional genomics, bioinformatics, molecular biology as well as hands on training in gene sequencing, gene annotations and plant genetic transformation.
Prof. Reddy is the project coordinator, Rockefeller Foundation, Rice Biotechnology Project in India under the Food Security Programme.