A gene that can improve the quality of rice without reducing yield has been identified by two separate teams.

Long, slender grains are considered a mark of quality for rice in many parts of the world. Xiangdong Fu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his team mapped the genomes of 4,500 plants from a long-grain rice variety and zeroed in on a gene known as Os07g0603300. Upregulation of this gene increases cell division in the longitudinal direction and decreases it in the transverse direction. This results in a long, thin grain with very little 'chalkiness' — an undesirable opaque appearance — and no yield penalty. The gene can be repressed by a transcription factor encoded by a neighbouring gene.

Independently, Qian Qian of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Shenzhen, and his team discovered extra copies of Os07g0603300 in rice varieties with these desirable traits.

Nature Genet. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ng.3352; http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ng.3346 (2015)