A farmer in traditional attire tending to a mustard field filled with yellow flowers.
The Gates Foundation has awarded a grant of $5 million to Professor Venkatesan Sundaresan and colleagues in India to expand self-cloning seed technology to crops that are popular in India but not widely traded internationally, such as Indian mustard and pearl millet. The technology will allow farmers to save seeds from high-yielding hybrid varieties and plant them the next year. (Photo of mustard field from Getty Images.)

Grant to Expand Self-Cloning Crop Technology for Indian Farmers

Plant Biologist Receives Grant to Produce Higher-Yielding Crops for Sustainable Agriculture

  • by Liana Wait

Venkatesan Sundaresan, a Distinguished Professor of plant biology and plant sciences at the University of California, Davis, has been awarded a Gates Foundation grant to develop self-cloning crops for Indian farmers. The five-year, $4.9 million project is a collaboration with researchers Myeong-Je Cho at UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), Viswanathan Chinnusamy at the ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR-IARI), New Delhi and Ravi Maruthachalam at the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER-Thiruvananthapuram).

The project aims to sustainably improve agricultural productivity by producing high-yielding crops that clone themselves, allowing farmers to save their superior seeds from one season to the next. It’s based on a technology called “synthetic apomixis,” which Sundaresan’s lab previously developed in rice.

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