Researchers from the University of Washington and China have cracked the genetic code of rice, a scientific sequencing feat that should lead to improved grain crops and help reduce hunger and malnutrition around the world.
The new maps of the rice genome will make it easier for plant breeders to develop hardy, high-yielding versions of a variety of crops without genetic engineering, scientists say.
The breakthrough by UW geneticists Jun Yu and Gane Ka-Shu Wong, in conjunction with a Chinese research group, is detailed in one of two papers dealing with rice genetics being published today in the journal Science.
Wong and Yu sequenced the most commonly grown variety of rice in China and many other Asian-Pacific regions. Rice is a staple for more than half the world's population.
"If you think about why the Chinese want to sequence rice, it's the No. 1 food on the table," said Yu, associate director of the Chinese genome center in Beijing and a UW faculty member. "There is nothing in the Chinese diet that compares with rice."
A group from Syngenta AG's Torrey Mesa Research Institute in San Diego sequenced a different variety of rice. That genetic map also appears in today's Science.
"The future of agriculture will be navigated using the rice genome map," said Steve Briggs, president of the research institute.
Genetic Blueprint Similar to Corn, Wheat
The genetic blueprint of rice is similar to the genomes for corn, wheat and other plants descended from wild grasses. Plant geneticists say the rice map will make it much quicker to identify genetic traits and create new versions of crops by the old-fashioned method of cross breeding.
"Over the past ten years, scientists have worked out the relationship between the layout of the gene sets for all the major cereal crops, so knowing where a gene is on rice will tell us where it is on corn and wheat," Wong said.
"This is important," he said, "because the corn and wheat genomes are six and 40 times larger than rice, so they are much more expensive to sequence."
