Genetic Pathway to Flood-Friendly, High-Yield Rice

Frequent flooding can take the punch out of a significant portion of Southeast Asia's rice fields. In those places where only deep water strains of rice will survive in such wet conditions, the grain yield is typically just one-third of that derived from more productive rice varieties.

A breakthrough in genetics may well end up making far more than a bushel of difference.

Motoyuki Ashikari and his team at Nagoya University's Bioscience and Biotechnology Center in Japan have isolated a pair of genes associated with stem length, and both are unique to the deep water rice strains.

After introducing this genetic material into selected high-yield varieties, Ashikari and his team observed the plants to respond to the wetter conditions by growing longer stems in and surviving the extreme moisture.

Next up, the team hopes, is the development of breeds of rice that are expressly capable of delivering a higher grain yield while thriving in low lying, flood-prone areas.

Photo courtesy of Charlie Fong, via Wikimedia Commons