Current Affairs - Biotechnology

The Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) has notified key change in rules that will allow genome-edited plants or organisms without any “foreign” genes to be subjected to a different regulatory process than the one applied to genetically engineered products.

The changes will exempt two categories of genome-edited products — in which genes are tweaked (Technique- SDN 1 & SDN 2) but not inserted from another organism (Technique-SDN 3) — from being treated as transgenic products.

A team of researchers from Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, ICAR-Indian Institute of Rice Research and University of Hyderabad has developed a Novel Nanoparticle-based Bio-Degradable-Carbonoid-Metabolite (BioDCM) that can protect agricultural crops from fungal and bacterial infections.

About the Technology

• The Nano particles (Bio-DCM) are protective biological alternative of certain microbial metabolites that can be used to enhance crop protection against various diseases.

“IndiGau’, India’s first Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) based chip for the conservation of pure varieties of indigenous cattle breeds like, Gir, Kankrej, Sahiwal, Ongole, etc. was launched on 13 August 2021.

The Philippines has become the first country in the world to approve commercial cultivation of vitamin A-rich Golden Rice.

Why is it in News?

The Government of Kerala is taking all possible steps to make people aware about the ill effects of trans fat. The Health Department has drawn up an action plan to create public awareness on the dangerous effects of trans fatty acids (TFA) in commercially available food items and to promote the local food industry to meet the current statutory limits set for TFA.