Rice that can withstand climate change, salt
Scientists are one step closer to developing a new salt-resistant rice variety which they say could help farmers breed crops with higher yields and tolerant to climate change.
Early beneficiaries of this new variety would be Japanese farmers who need salt-tolerant rice plants after their fields were inundated in last year’s devastating tsunami.
The new method for marker assisted breeding, developed jointly by British and Japanese scientists, is being used to slash the time it takes to isolate new traits such as salt tolerance.
Details of the new method, called MutMap, were published in the journal Nature Biotechnology so that they can be used by scientists and breeders to dramatically accelerate crop breeding worldwide.
“The beauty of the new method is its simplicity,” said Professor Sophien Kamoun, co-author on the paper and Head of the Sainsbury Laboratory on Norwich Research Park.
“By working with cultivars favoured by farmers and already adapted to local conditions, the MutMap method will enable plant scientists and breeders to develop new crop varieties in nearer a year rather than five to ten years.”
The new technique also takes advantage of the speed at which sequencing can now be done to screen plant mutants for valuable traits.
“Until now, plant breeding has not been able to take advantage of the genomics revolution,” said lead author Prof Ryohei Terauchi of Japan’s Iwate Biotechnology Research Centre.
“MutMap overcomes one of the greatest limitations, which has been the time it takes to identify genetic markers for desirable traits.”
Important traits like drought and salt tolerance, plant height and yield, and semidwarfism are often controlled by many genes each having a subtle effect. It is therefore difficult to identify the complete genetic basis for them.
Such traits are often bred in from wild relatives and without genetic engineering many years of back-crossing are required to breed out all the characteristics of the wild plant except the quality desired.
In the new method, scientists worked with an elite rice cultivar and created mutants that harbour different traits.
