University of Hyderabad conducts Millet-Utopia for school students

Hyderabad: The University of Hyderabad (UoH) is conducting a program titled “Millet-Utopia” as part of the international year of Millets 2023.
Since October 2022, monthly events have been conducted relevant to millets and their significance. In this regard, a mega-event was organised to spread awareness on the theme ‘millets for food and nutrition’ among the students of classes 8, 9, and 10. The program was well received by the schools.
830 students from 34 schools in Hyderabad participated, along with 74 teachers. This event was organized by Convenor, UoH-IYoM 2023 Dr M. Muthamilarasan, in collaboration with the Indian National Young Academy of Sciences (INYAS), New Delhi.
The inaugural function of ‘Millet-Utopia’ was held at the auditorium of the School of Life Sciences, in which Prof. Rajeev Varshney, of Murdoch University, Australia, and, Senior Scientist, DBT-NIPGR, New Delhi, Dr Manoj Prasad joined as special invitees. Department of Plant Sciences’ head, professor S Rajagopal welcomed the participants and delivered the opening remarks.
Also Read University of Hyderabad to hold ‘Millet-Utopia’ on December 23 It was followed by the keynote address of Prof. Rajeev Varshney. Prof. Varshney demonstrated how genomics delivers improved crop varieties to the farmers and how genome sequencing of pearl millet played a role in accentuating India’s contribution to millet genome sequencing. Prasad described how millets could serve as a source of informative genes useful for climate-resilient agriculture.
He demonstrated an example of a small heat shock protein-encoding gene isolated from foxtail millet, which conferred tolerance to heat stress when overexpressed in rice. Students who attended the talks were very interactive and asked several interesting questions to both speakers.