About the Programme
The 2 year M.Sc (Agriculture) programme in ‘Genetics and Plant Breeding (GPB)’ includes topics related to different aspects of genetics and plant breeding courses. It mostly covers the fundamentals of genetics, bio-metrical genetics, and cytogenetics and also, its wide applications in the crop improvement programme at the field level. Students would get opportunities to acquire both theoretical and practical knowledge of some important crop improvement techniques like fundamentals of plant breeding, mutation breeding, breeding under biotic and abiotic stress, techniques for cereal, pulse and oil seed breeding, techniques to improve trials controlled by quantitative and qualitative genes, etc. Further, students would learn principles and basics of advanced breeding techniques like marker assisted selection, QTL and association mapping, and diversity analysis.
Regular practical training in the laboratories and in fields are an important features of this programme. Students would get opportunities to interact with the field breeders and scientists of different state research institutes and private seed industries. The IRDM centre is closely associated with these organizations to enrich the academics of this programme into new dimension.