Crops usage is growing rapidly in the world at the same time as the production chain is stumbling.
It is being tested by climate change, soil impoverishment and rising costs. Plant breeders are working hard all over the world to figure out how to increase yields.
Chinese a team of researchers found one solution. When a plant physiologist Wenbin Zhou from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and his colleagues added one copy of the plant’s own gene to rice, the yield of rice increased by almost half.
The extra gene helps the plant utilize fertilizer, strengthen copulation and speed up flowering, the team reports Sciencein the journal.
The now identified yield booster was screened out of over a hundred regulatory genes. Regulatory genes affect the function of other genes. Rice and corn genes were selected for the mapping, which had already been found to be central to linkage.
Nitrogen the intake quadrupled in the experiment.
Zhou and his colleagues planted rice in low-nitrogen soil and monitored whether any of the genes under study were activated. After all, genes that cope with nutrient scarcity could be those that enhance nutrient absorption.
The experiment paid off. Nitrogen deficiency activated 13 regulatory genes. Five of them increased nitrogen uptake by at least fourfold.
Next researchers took a closer look at one of them.
They added this gene, named osdreb1c, to some of the rice plants and correspondingly turned it off in others. Then they observed how the rice grew in the greenhouse.
Plants from which the gene had been removed grew worse than the controls. An extra piece of the same gene, on the other hand, slowed the shoot’s growth and stretched its roots longer.
The measurement showed that the rice with the additional gene absorbed more nitrogen than usual. They also had a third more green cells and the rubisco enzyme, which is needed for bonding.
Of two field trials lasting up to three years confirmed that the additional gene increases the yield.
A gene added to a rice variety favored by farmers increased the yield by up to 40 percent of the usual one.
“Really impressive. I’ve never seen anything like it,” praises the plant geneticist Matthew Paul from the Rothamsted Research Institute of Agriculture on the website of Science magazine.
The method can be applied to other plants as well, the researchers believe. According to preliminary tests, it also works on wheat and ryegrass.
Published in Tiede magazine 10/2022
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