The Lucknow-based National Botanical Research Institute (NBRI) is developing a genetically modified (GM) cotton for resisting the incidence of sucking pests, which Bt cotton has failed to encounter. "NBRI has been working for development of novel delta endotoxins and transgenic cotton for resistance to cotton bollworms and sucking pests. A chimeric and endotoxin gene Cry 1 EC was designed at NBRI to target a common Indian pest, Spodoptera litura. It has been deployed in several crop plants, including cotton, groundnut, tomato, and chickpea. Several candidate genes are being examined for giving resistance to sucking pests in cotton," said the NBRI director, Rakesh Tuli. According to Tuli, cotton cultivation faces the challenges of biotic and abiotic stresses. The quality and yield of lint reduce the competitiveness of Indian cotton. Conventional plant breeding has been effective in the improvement of cotton cultivars and hybrids. Enhancing heterotic vigour, introducing conditional male sterility, and deploying tools for accelerated breeding are important to enhancing yields in India. He said that NBRI was examining the diverse germplasm collection of Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium herbaceum for genomic prospecting of genes for drought tolerance and fibre quality in cotton. Whole transcriptome sequencing from the leaf and root of germplasm, constrasting for agronomically important traits has been used for identification of a large number of SNPs. Cotton gene chip (Affymetrix) representing about 24,000 genes has been deployed in expression profiling to identify the genes expressed differentially in drought stress and fibre development. A number of genes have been identified for functional validiation. Tuli said that identification of novel genes for dealing with biotic and abiotic stresses through genomic expression arrays and development of physical genomic maps using SSR, SNP, and EST markers was a major challenge.