National Botanical Research Institute: New Research
The National Botanical Research Institute (NBRI) recently achieved a breakthrough by cultivating the exotic flower, Eustoma, native to Mexico and America, in Odisha after successfully growing it on its campus in Lucknow.
- National Botanical Research Institute (NBRI) is amongst one of the constituent research institutes of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
- It is located in the city of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.
- It is a multi-disciplinary plant research centre of international repute, undertaking basic and applied R&D programmes in several strategically important areas of plant sciences.
- Originally set up as the National Botanic Gardens (NBG) by the State Government of Uttar Pradesh (U.P.), it was taken over by the CSIR in 1953.
- Though initially engaged in research work in the classical botanical disciplines, the NBG went on laying an increasing emphasis, in keeping with the national needs and priorities in the field of plant sciences, on its applied and developmental research activities.
- NBG was renamed as the NBRI,e., The National Botanical Research Institute in 1978.
- Objectives is Basic and applied research on plant diversity and prospection, plant-environment interaction and biotechnological approaches for plant improvement.
- The NBRI R&D department has seven divisions under which they conduct various researches. ]
- CSIR-NBRI has a well-designed Botanic Garden spread over 25 hectares with documented collections of about 5,000 indigenous and exotic plant species and varieties.
- It has an herbarium with 253,103 reference collections of flowering and non-flowering plants of India and two field research stations at Banthra.
- The institute is known for its outstanding contributions to enriching the knowledge base on India’s plant diversity, particularly in developing globally competent biotech and microbial technologies, herbal products, and plant databases.
