Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences have developed supercharged rice that can absorb more fertilizer, increase photosynthesis, and accelerate flowering by tweaking the plant’s gene.
Through the technique, the scientists were able to boost the yield of rice crops by up to 40%.
Improving photosynthesis is a promising approach to increasing crop yields and making agriculture more sustainable.
Read the story @Yahoo News
More on improving rice through genetic tweaking:
Golden Rice
IRRI and its national research partners have developed Golden Rice to complement existing interventions to address vitamin A deficiency (VAD). VAD is a serious public health problem affecting millions of children and pregnant women globally.
Biofortification
Biofortification is the process of improving the nutritional quality of food crops. This can be achieved through agronomic practices, conventional breeding or biotechnology-based approaches like genetic engineering and genome editing.
CRISPR-Cas system: Revolutionizing the genetic blueprint of rice
One of the most discussed scientific events in today’s world is the discovery and application of the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) system in genome editing. CRISPR is simply a specialized bacterial immune system that scientists have modified into a tool for eliminating or manipulating the set of genetic instructions in animals, plants, and even humans. This tool is easy to use and cheap, which adds more value to this technology for rice scientists working on eliminating or modifying unwanted traits and inserting new traits to improve the crop’s yield, resistance to diseases, and ability to thrive under harsh environmental conditions.
