UK: Researchers add second copy of gene to give rice a 40% yield boost
Rice
United Kingdom
Published Aug 2, 2022
Tridge summary
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China, working with a colleague from Germany, has boosted the yield of rice by 40% by giving test plants a second copy of a certain gene. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their work in improving rice yields to meet growing food demands in light of a continuing rise in global population. Steven Kelly with the University of Oxford, has published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining the work done by the team in China.
Original content
As the world's population continues to grow, scientists around the world are looking for ways to get more food out of the land available for use in growing crops. In this new effort, the researchers looked at ways to improve rice yields by genetically altering DNA to coax individual plants to produce more grains of rice.The plants that humans have chosen to cultivate came to be farmed by humans due to a variety of events that transpired many years ago. Study of such plants has shown that they are not all equally good at photosynthesis, however. Corn, is very efficient, for example, while rice is much less so. Thus, scientists have been seeking to improve the efficiency of photosynthesis in rice, and in some cases, made improvements.In this new effort, the researchers took a different approach. Their work began, as Kelly notes, by asking how rice responds to challenges such as depleted nutrition. They found that expression of OxDREBIC, a transcription factor, was upregulated when ...
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