Quality Protein Maize Variety (QPM-1) Way Out for Better Health and Economy for Temperate Conditions of Kashmir

Maize is the third most important cereal in the world. Over 43m ha of maize is grown in Asia producing 166 million tons with an average yield of 3.8t/h (Anonymous, 2004). Asia consumes more than 62 per cent of the maize production in the form of animal feed and the remaining for human consumption. The biological value of protein is low owing to the fact that normal maize protein is deficient in essential amino acids like lysine, tryptophan and threonine and therefore needs protein supplementation from legume and animal proteins. There are very few examples where nutritional objective have made an effective contribution to planning agricultural research for developing countries. The complex nature of the nutrition and the limitations of formal planning procedures help to explain the failure. The most important of them is the development of quality protein maize (QPM) after the discovery of maize mutant in the mid 1960 , s containing the opaque-2 gene (Mertz et al., 1964) which enhances levels of lysine and tryptophan in the endosperm protein. This opened a new era in breeding for improvement of quality in maize. Through an interdisciplinary research involving breeders, biochemists and other disciplinary scientists, researches of CIMMYT and worldwide started slowly but steadily developed what we now call as QPM (Vasal, 1993).The QPM is O2 maize (mutant) genetically identified for hard endosperm by selection of modifier genes in order to overcome the agronomic constraints.