Organization: Ajeet Seeds Pvt. Ltd
MD: Mr Sameer Mulay
BioScience Revenue: Rs 455 crore

Ajeet Seeds Pvt Ltd established in 1986 during the Green Revolution era has recorded overall turnover of `700 crore for the year 2014-15 and Bt cotton alone has contributed around 65 percent of its total revenue. The company had an encouraging Kharif season in 2014 and is looking at hybrid vegetable seeds export next year for growth.

With the clear understanding of the pivotal role biotechnology plays in seed industry, the company had established a separate research and diagnostics division, Plant Biotechnology Research Center (PBRC) in 2003 and the company is trying to develop indigenous patentable transgenic technology for the crops which shall accelerate the progress furthermore in future.

Ajeet Seeds, the company with many years of excellence and earnestly dedicated to farm prosperity, is already geared up for genetic research using crop biotechnology for the prosperity of Indian farmers. It had introduced genetically modified three Bt cotton hybrids in Kharif-2006. In 2015 it is looking at introducing new variety of hybrid rice, corn and vegetable seeds.

The company is also looking at expanding its business to new territories in the country with tissue cultured plants. The thrust of research at the Plant Biotechnology Center is to bring to bear the science of plant tissue culture and plant molecular biology in the development of novel crop plants via the usage of techniques like embryo rescue, in vitro regeneration, induction of somatic embryogenesis, in vitro mutagenesis, dihaploid and transgenic technology.
Ajeet Seeds is also involved in-vitro propagation of banana on a commercial scale. Banana breeding is handicapped by the fact that banana is triploid and sterile. Hence, there is need to develop alternatives. The Plant Biotechnology Center has embarked upon a program of in-vitro mutagenesis of banana to develop novel genotypes with enhanced agronomical characteristics.

The plant molecular biology lab is involved inisolation and heterologous expression of novel genes for introduction of resistance for biotic and abiotic stresses, for enhanced biomass and crop yields, says company.

Apart from this marker assisted selection (MAS) for different agronomic traits, germplasm evaluation and hybrid purity testing are routinely being employed in PBRC.
It has also embarked upon the development of DNA and protein- based diagnostic tools and kits for bacterial/viral disease indexing recently.