The recent drought in Brazil meant 10% less sugarcane will be harvested this season in comparison to last year, and made it clear the need of drought resistant varieties.<\/p>\n
To this end, there are a number of projects already in place, one being the EUnergyCane variety being developed in Spain by the anglospanish company Alkol Biotech. To this end, and since GMOs have a questionable image in Europe, the company has preferred the “traditional” method of regular pollination, is leading a consortium which includes 3 universities and the city of Motril in Spain, and expects to have a variety by the year 2020.<\/p>\n
In Brazil, the government agricultural research agency Embrapa is instead using genetic engineering strategies to genetically create drought-tolerant varieties. In January this year, the ten most promising varieties were planted at the field labs of CTC – Centro de Tecnologia Canavieira, at the town of Piracicaba in the state of S\u00e3o Paulo. Now the researchers are requesting permission from the brazilian National Technical Commission on Biosafety (CTNBio) to perform experimental tests on two fields: one in the Midwest and one in the South.<\/p>\n
The problem is that drought tolerance is a complex trait which involves large numbers of genes and physiological mechanisms. Precisely because of the complexity of drought tolerance, Embrapa researchers employ a gene encoding regulatory proteins of several other genes.<\/p>\n
The initial results however are promising, as they indicate that the varieties also showed an increased sucrose content, the rate of budding, and herbicide resistance.<\/p>\n
Another similar project is the one being by Petrobras, which along with Embrapa is developing new technology for sugar cane production in colder climates. Backed by the investment of US$2 million, the project objective is to obtain varieties suited to colder states such as Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The recent drought in Brazil meant 10% less sugarcane will be harvested this season in comparison to last year, and made it clear the need of drought resistant varieties. To this end, there are a number of projects already in place, one being the EUnergyCane variety being developed in Spain by the anglospanish company Alkol […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[],"supplier":[8595,14044,3107,8593,786],"class_list":["post-23417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","supplier-alkol-biotech","supplier-ctc-centro-de-tecnologia-canavieira","supplier-embrapa","supplier-ctnbio","supplier-petrobras"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23417"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=23417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}