Khalsa College lecture considers production and quality of cane
Khalsa College recently hosted a session on “traditional and non-traditional approaches to sugarcane improvement.” The seminar’s primary goal was to inform the staff and students about recent studies and initiatives to enhance the sugarcane crop via the use of both conventional and biotechnology methods in order to increase yields.
Dr. Gulzar Singh Sanghera, the director-principal and sugarcane breeder at Punjab Agriculture University’s Regional Research Centre in Kapurthala, served as the keynote speaker. Special guests included Assistant Cane Commissioner Punjab, SS Bajwa, and Punjab’s Cane Commissioner, Rajesh Kumar Raheja. Key themes they addressed were early sugarcane ripening, lodging resistance, stress environment resistance, disease resistance, insect resistance, and juice quality components. The technique has been used, they said, to enhance sugarcane output, maturity, disease resistance, drought tolerance, and isolation yield.
According to Dr. Sanghera, inter-specific hybridization produces current sugarcane cultivars with considerable polyploidy and aneuploidy. The sugarcane genome is believed to be 10 gbp in size, and it contains up to 10–12 different allelic variants of each gene. Approximately 800-900 megabytes is the estimated size of the monoploid genome, depending on various stages. According to him, sugarcane cultivars that are resistant to drought can endure water stress for up to 36 days and produce much more than the control variety BL-19 when faced with drought.
