Roots breakthrough for drought-resistant rice

Fox News via AFP: Japanese biotechnologists on Sunday said they had developed a rice plant with deeper roots that can sustain high yields in droughts that wipe out conventional rice crops. It is the third breakthrough in new cereal strains in less than two years, boosting the quest to feed the world's spiralling population at a time of worsening climate change.

Writing in the journal Nature Genetics, a team led by Yusaku Uga of the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Tsukuba describe how they found a remarkable gene in a rice plant cultivated in the dry uplands of the Philippines.

This rice strain, also called cultivar, is called Kinandang Patong. Its big characteristic is roots that are deep and grow straight downwards, delving into parched soil for water, as opposed to root systems that are shallow and grow out sideways in typical water-rich paddy fields.

The gene for this, called Deep Rooting -- dubbed DR01 -- was spliced into a cultivar called IR64, a paddy rice plant that is grown around Asia....Moderate drought reduced yield from IR64 to just 42 percent of no-drought conditions. Severe drought destroyed it totally.

But IR64 with the DR01 gene was almost unaffected by moderate drought. In severe drought, yield fell -- but not catastrophically -- by around 30 percent. "Based on our results, this variety can be adapted to upland (agriculture) without irrigation," Uga said in an email exchange with AFP....

Perennial rice seeds, shot by Desmanthus4food, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States license

GM crops 'could feed the world'

UK Press Assocation: Genetically-modified crops could help prevent a future global hunger crisis, the Government's chief scientific adviser said. Professor Sir John Beddington said there was no one "silver bullet" to the "enormously serious" problem of feeding the world in the future in the face of problems such as climate change, population growth and energy shortages.

He told BBC Breakfast: "If there are genetically modified (GM) organisms that actually solve problems that we can't solve in other ways, and are shown to be safe from a human health point of view, and safe from an environmental point of view, and they can solve problems we can't solve otherwise, then we should use them.

"The sort of problems I am thinking of are new diseases which are likely to come with climate change, problems to do with drought, problems to do with the salination of ground, we need organisms that actually address that."

Sir John was speaking in advance of the publication of a Government-commissioned report warning that urgent action is needed to avert global hunger on a huge scale in the future as factors such as a growing global population, climate change, scarcity of water and energy put massive pressure on food production.

"I don't think we are going to run out (of food) if we get it right, but the point is, we don't have time to actually relax and say things are fine - in 20 years' time, the world population is going to be sky high, demand for food, demand for water, demand for energy, is going to be way up there," he said.
Sir John said there were "many solutions" to preventing a hunger crisis, including using current knowledge of farming techniques to "significantly improve" the productivity of small farmers in Africa…

Over time, selective breeding modifies teosinte's few fruitcases (left) into modern corn's rows of exposed kernels (right). Shot by John Doebley from "Genetically Modified Corn— Environmental Benefits and Risks" Gewin V PLoS Biology Vol. 1, No. 1, e8 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0000008 http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=slideshow&type=figure&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0000008&id=39332, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license

Dramatic changes in agriculture needed as world warms and grows, researchers say

PhysOrg: The looming threats of global climate change and population growth call for sweeping changes in how the world produces its food and fiber, warns a group of prestigious scientists, including an expert in plant genetics at the University of California, Davis.

The research team, led by Nina Federoff, science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, suggests that there is a "critical need to get beyond popular biases against the use of agricultural biotechnology," as well as explore the potential of aquaculture and maximize agricultural production in dry and saline areas. Their recommendations will appear as a perspective piece titled "Radically Rethinking Agriculture for the 21st Century" in the Feb. 12 issue of the journal Science.

The researchers note that the impacts of climate change on agriculture and human health are already apparent. They point to the 2003 heat wave in Europe, which caused just a 3.5-degree rise in the average summer temperature, but killed 30,000 to 50,000 people. Gaining much less attention was the resulting 20 percent to 36 percent decrease in the yields of grains and fruit that summer.

"That dramatic drop in yield is just a foreshadowing of the challenges that lie ahead for agriculture during the 21st century, as temperatures rise and another 3 billion people are added to the global population," said UC Davis plant pathologist Pamela Ronald, a co-author on the perspective piece. Ronald and her laboratory are working on developing a new generation of crops that can better resist diseases and tolerate environmental stresses, including flooding.

"Global warming will alter the pattern of diseases among crops and also cause intense, periodic flooding," Ronald said. "The good news is that we have the ability, through conventional breeding and genetic engineering, to generate new varieties of our existing food crops that can better adapt to these environmental changes.

….The researchers also suggest that future food, feed and fiber crops would ideally be capable of making better use of nitrogen from the environment, to minimize water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions associated with chemical fertilizers.....

These transgenic plums called C5 contain a gene that makes them highly resistant to plum pox virus. Photo by Scott Bauer.

`Biotechnology could be a tool to combat climate change,' says lecturer in India

ExpressBuzz (India): Climate change is a reality and seeing nothing, hearing nothing and doing nothing to lessen its impact on life on the earth are no longer an option, said Prof Kadambot Siddique, Director of the University of Western Australia.

Addressing students and teachers of the Kerala Agricultural University at Vellanikkara the other day, he said that biotechnology was not a solution to climate change. But it could be an important and effective tool to combat climate change. He said that considerable efforts and investments by governments and other agencies in research and development to increase food production and optimise the use of water would be essential for fighting climate change in the coming years.

He said that the impact of climate change on Indian agriculture is expected to be severe in the coming years as Indian agriculture is heavily dependent on monsoon and irrigation.… The drying-up of the atmosphere and the change in climate would make water scarce both for drinking and irrigation, making farming uneconomical for farmers in the affected areas. This would bring down the total area under cultivation with its concomitant adverse impact on overall food production in the country.

Siddique said that to make up the decline in food production, development of new high yielding, disease resistant and climate-adaptive crop species would be essential.

A GMO maize test in Bourgouin-Jallieu, Isère, France. Shot by Yann Forget, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2