KARACHI, July 4: Biotechnology offers solution to overcome drought and salinity. This was pointed out by speakers on Tuesday, at the second day of the Life Science-Higher Education Commission workshop on Advance in Plant Ecology being held at the University of Karachi.

The four-day moot was inaugurated on Monday. Dr Zabta Khan Shinwari, vice-chancellor of Kohat University of Science and Technology, was the chief guest on the occasion.

The four-day moot is being attended by teachers of as many as 20 varsities of Pakistan and is meant to apprise them of the recent developments in this very important discipline of botany.

The speakers pointed out that recently several genes had been reported by scientists and that if they were engineered in our staple crops, they would greatly help increase the crops’ resistance against drought and salinity. It will save irrigated ecosystem, cost of irrigation, water availability and water use efficiency, they said.

They further said that biotechnology offered new methods to understand the problems of our ecosystems and would let us know how to conserve the depleted natural resources.—APP