By giving a Chinese rice variety a second copy of one of its own genes, researchers have boosted its yield by up to 40%.
The change helps the plant absorb more fertilizer, boosts photosynthesis, and accelerates flowering, all of which could contribute to larger harvests, the groupThe yield gain from a single gene coordinating these multiple effects is “really impressive,” says Matthew Paul, a plant geneticist at Rothamsted Research who was not involved in the work. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like that before.
To find other candidate yield boosters, a team led by plant biologist Wenbin Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences combed through 118 rice and maize regulatory genes, which encode proteins called transcription factors, that other researchers had previously identified as likely important in photosynthesis. Zhou’s team sought to find out whether any of the genes were activated in rice grown in low-nitrogen soil, because such genes might boost uptake of the nutrient.
Importantly, the researchers also transformed a high-yielding rice variety often planted by farmers by adding an extra copy of the gene. These modified modern rice plantsthan did controls, the researchers report. “That’s a big number,” says Pam Ronald, a rice geneticist at the University of California, Davis. “Amazing.”
The modified plants also flowered sooner, which gave them more time to devote to making grain. Faster flowering can offer other advantages, depending on the environment, for example allowing farmers to grow more crops per season or to harvest crops before damaging summer heat sets in. However, although the modified Nipponbare flowered up to 19 days earlier, the widely farmed variety of rice bloomed just 2 days earlier. gene to a research variety of wheat and found the same types of effects.
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