Stand up for bigger rice harvests!
Nature Biotechnology pp 105 - 109
Japanese researchers have found that a rice plant that grows with its shoots more erect will produce more grains than normal. The rice, which was produced by a non-transgenic approach, is reported in January’s Nature Biotechnology and promises to enable the creation of rice varieties that are more productive under dense planting conditions.
Tomoaki Sakamoto and colleagues identified the erect rice by screening a population of plants in which different rice genes had been randomly knocked out. The erect rice contains a mutation in a gene that produces a type of plant steroid involved in growth. Although it was long suspected that more erect leaves might enable plant parts closer to the soil to capture more light and thus promote growth, previous attempts at knocking out genes to accomplish this only stunted growth and produced smaller, misshapen grains. Luckily, loss of the newly identified gene has no apparent negative effects, and the leaves that are more upright accumulate more nutrients that can be directed to making grains.
Improvements in yield even in the absence of extra fertilizer suggest that this approach might circumvent the harmful environmental effects of chemical fertilizers.
