Keen to polish its global image, the multinational life sciences company Monsanto has announced royalty-free licences to its technology for producing rice varieties with enhanced levels of provitamin A.

The move comes four months after the company revealed that it had completed the draft sequencing of the rice genome, and had agreed to make the results available to researchers (see Nature 404, 534; 2000). Last week's announcement included news of Monsanto's new website giving researchers access to its genome sequence database.

In a statement, Monsanto said that both moves were part of its ongoing commitment to global agricultural research aimed at facilitating the use of the company's technologies and data for the common good. The draft sequence data have already been transferred to Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries as the lead agency of the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project.

The latest moves by Monsanto, which have received a cautious welcome from environmentalist groups, follow a report issued last month by seven national scientific academies urging companies to offer certain proprietary technologies free to the developing world (see Nature 406 , 115; 2000).

http://www.rice-research.org