Mutation breeding of oil seeds, pulses and cereals

• Mutation breeding is a promising technology developed by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Trombay.
• Since we import 40 per cent oilseeds and 20 per cent pulses, BARC focused its attention primarily on these crops.
• Heritable mutations of genes occur spontaneously in all living beings; but their rates are extremely low — of the order of one in a million.
• Isolating living organisms with beneficial characteristics from nature and multiplying them by selective breeding is a very slow process.
• Scientists speed up the mutation rate a thousand fold by exposing seeds or in some instances parts of the plant to ionising radiation.
• Breeders produce plants from these irradiated seeds.
• They combine plants with different desirable characteristics to develop high yielding, early maturing and disease resistant plants.
• Pigeon pea and mung bean suffer viral attacks; soya beans are hit by bacteria; drought and salinity affect pulses and oil seeds; some plants are sensitive to temperature.
• Pre-harvest sprouting and in situ germination are other worrying conditions. Scientists have overcome most of these adversities by genetic manipulation.

Improved quality

• Wheat plant can be made heat tolerant and resistant to stem rust. They have developed many varieties of rice. Some are early harvestable ; others salt tolerant; a few are disease resistant. Reduced height Basmati is another notable contribution.
• The development of better crop plants takes time. Scientists test the improved crops at least for three years in BARC fields before they are entered for evaluation trials conducted by the agricultural universities etc.
• BARC scientists set up linkages with farmers to produce quality breeder seeds and participate actively in Kisan Melas held in farmers’ fields to popularize the technology.
• They developed 41 new crop varieties (Trombay varieties) by radiation induced mutation and cross-breeding; these have been released and officially notified by the Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India for commercial cultivation.

A strong case for amending MTP Act

• The Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act in India came into existence in 1971.
• It was amended in 2003 to facilitate better implementation and increase access for women especially in the private health sector.
• Making out a strong case to amend the Act to increase the availability of safe and legal abortions in India, all stakeholders argue that unsafe abortions still continue to outnumber safe and legal abortions in the country.
• Unsafe abortions contribute to eight per cent of the total maternal deaths and unaccounted figure of morbidity.
• These maternal deaths and morbidities can be addressed through expanding the base of safe abortions, more so keeping in mind the medical advancements.
• Proposed amendments have been under the consideration of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for the past seven years. However, nothing concrete has come out due to the fear of “misuse of liberal abortion law for sex selective abortions.”
• One of the major amendments calls for expanding the base for medical termination of abortions by including midlevel providers in conducting the procedures, particularly during the second trimester, and certification for allowing the abortion by one provider as against two, as is the case now.
• In the backdrop of shortage of doctors, certification by two service providers — two gynaecologists or two MBBS doctors with requisite training to conduct abortion or a gynaecologist and one MBBS doctor with requisite training — to allow termination of pregnancy often acts as a barrier for women wanting abortion.
• The issue is more critical in the rural areas where there is an acute shortage of a gynaecologist even at the Community Health Centres.
• The system therefore forces women to go for unsafe procedures.
• Experts make their argument stronger by quoting the 2011 census figures; close to 70 per cent of people live in 6,41,000 villages.
• Qualified doctors are primarily available in urban areas rather than rural areas.
• The recent national level facility survey report (IIPS, 2005) highlights that only 15 per cent of the Primary Health Centres across the country have at least one doctor who has received MTP training.
• This implies that 2.24 lakh rural population have access to only one MTP trained doctor.
• The facility survey 2003 highlights that while 60 per cent of PHCs are equipped with MTP equipment, only 6 per cent of PHCs offer safe abortion services. One of the primary reasons for this is the non-availability of trained providers.
• Even if one trained doctor is available at all PHCs across the country and offers MTP services, the number of women served would be 15,000 to 20,000. This would still not be adequate to make safe services available to women.
• There is global evidence to show that “trained mid-level providers can perform manual vacuum aspiration safely, and provide medical methods of abortion” and that doing so “can help ensure appropriate service availability and accessibility without compromising safety” (WHO technical consultation 2003).
• Studies in India have shown that MVA can be provided with equal safety and effectiveness by nurses and physicians. Shireen Jejeebhoy of Population Council in a study in August 2011 concluded that medical abortion can be as safely and effectively provided by Ayurveda physicians and nurses as physicians with MBBS qualification.

Comet impact leads to building blocks of life

• A crash of a comet (icy body) on rocky surfaces or rocky body on icy surface may be all that is required for seeding planets or satellites with amino acids — the basic building blocks so very essential for life.
• This was predicted using computer simulations in 2010 and 2013.
• Though comets harbour the organic precursors — some kind of carbon like methane or carbon dioxide, a nitrogen source like ammonia and water ice — of amino acids, the conversion of the precursors to amino acids would happen only if the impact has a specific speed, and hence, a specific shock pressure.
• A study published a few days ago in Nature Geoscience has for the first time experimentally produced amino acids by mimicking the impact of a rocky body on an icy surface.
• To mimic the way amino acids are produced by impacting comets, the researchers prepared several ice mixtures found on comets and shocked the mixtures by impacting them with 2 mm steel balls fired at high velocities. “Several amino acids, including linear and methyl alpha amino acids” were produced.
• Detectable levels of amino acids were formed only when the ice contained a mixture of ammonium hydroxide, carbon dioxide and methanol in a certain ratio (9.1:8:1) and was impacted by steel balls at 7.15 kilometres per second and 7 kilometres per second speeds.
•  These velocities produced a pressure of 50 gigapascal (500,000 bar).
• This is the “approximate pressure required for the dissociation and recombination of the ice molecules,.
• The suite of amino acids produced was the same in both the ice mixtures impacted with steel balls. The only difference between the first experiment and the second was in the abundance of certain amino acids produced.
• Since the alpha amino acid is produced by a two-step process, the initial composition of the ice — ammonia, carbon dioxide and methanol — is very important, they note.
• Another important observation has been the respective roles of impact shock and impact heating in the formation of alpha amino acids.
• They stress that impact shock (pressure) produced by the steel balls converts the ice mixture into amino acid precursors; the impact heating then changes the precursors into alpha amino acids.

Significant progress in bringing down under-5 mortality

• The country has made a steady progress in reducing the mortality rate of children below 5 years.
• It declined from 2.5 million in 2001 to 1.5 million in 2012 – a fall of 3.7 per cent annually – but female child mortality continued to exceed male mortality.
• A new report has shown that only one-third of the districts will achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of bringing down under-5 mortality to 38 deaths per 1,000 live births by 2015.
• Kerala is the only State where all districts have achieved the goals for neonates and children aged 1–59 month.
• The Lancet Global Health journal report says an analysis of data from 597 districts between 2001 and 2012 suggests that 222 or 37 per cent districts are on track to achieve the MDG of reducing under-5 child mortality to 38 deaths per 1,000 live births by 2015, but an equal number will achieve it only after 2020.
• These 222 lagging districts are home to 41 per cent of India’s live births and 56 per cent of all deaths in children younger than 5 years.
• Until 2012, female mortality at ages 1–59 months exceeded male mortality by more than 25 per cent in 303 districts and by more than 50 per cent in 169 districts across the country. Excess female mortality is seen in nearly all States, including Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which otherwise have relatively low under-5 mortality.
• Nationally, the 303 districts are home to more than 58 per cent of female live births and 68 per cent of female deaths at 1–59 months, totalling about 74 000 excess deaths in girls.
• As many as 251 districts lag behind the relevant goal for neonatal mortality (death within a month) as against than for 1–59 month mortality. Only 81 (14 per cent) districts account for 37 per cent of deaths in children younger than 5 years nationally, according to a paper “Neonatal, 1-59 month, and U-5 mortality in 597 Indian districts, 2001-2012: estimates from national demographic and mortality surveys’’
• At the current rates of progress, MDG- 4 on reduction of neonatal mortality will be met by India around 2020 _ rich States by 2015 and 2023 by the poorer ones, the paper says.Despite this progress,
• India still has the largest number of deaths in children younger than 5 years of any country in the world.
• Its large population and its enormous variation in social circumstances, access to health services, and other correlates of under-5 mortality mean that national statistics mask large local variation in sex-specific under-5 mortality and how this changes over time.
• In 2012, nine poorer States contained nearly half of all people in India and just over half of all births, but 71 per cent of the 1•5 million deaths in children younger than 5 years.
• Compared with the richer States, the poorer ones have notably higher mortality per 1000 live births. Girls had higher mortality at ages 1–59 months than did boys, meaning that nationally, for every 100 deaths of boys at these ages, 131 girls died.
• As many as 194 of the 222 districts lagging behind in meeting the MDG by more than 5 years are in the poorer States. Of the national totals, 12•6 million or 41 per cent live births took place in these 222 districts in 2012. By contrast, 203 or 91 per cent of the 222 districts on track to reach MDG are in the richer States.

Sources: Various News Paper