Tokyo (AsiaNews/Agencies) - A team of Japanese researchers has developed a new drought-resistant rice strain. It is the third breakthrough in new cereal strains in less than two years, and could alleviate hunger in many parts of the Asian continent.
Called Kinandang Patong, this cultivar was developed by a team led by Yusaku Uga of the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Tsukuba using a remarkable gene in a rice plant cultivated in the dry uplands of the Philippines. The findings were published in the journal Nature Genetics.
The gene, called Deep Rooting and dubbed DRO1, was spliced into a cultivar named IR64. Its main trait are stronger and deeper roots that grow straight downwards.
For Prof Uga, without genetic technology, it would have been extraordinarily hard to have pinpointed, and then inserted, the right gene.
"Development of GM rice plants is ... one of (the) useful strategies to improve drought resistance," he explained.
His team put the new plant through its paces, planting both modified and standard IR64 in upland fields in three kinds of conditions-no drought, moderate drought and severe drought.
The IR64 with the DRO1 gene was almost unaffected by moderate drought. In severe drought, yield fell-but not catastrophically-by around 30 per cent.
What Prof Uga and his team discovered is a great achievement in the field of gene technology.
This follows the announcement in January of last year that scientists in Britain and Japan had developed a fast-track technique, called MutMat, to identifys useful genetic variants, or mutations, in rice plants.
They used it to derive a strain from Japan's Hitomebore wild rice that is resistant to salinity-a boon for farmers with fields that have high salt content as a result of irrigation.
