Rice breeding breakthrough could feed billions

[edwest4]

Rice breeding breakthrough could feed billions

An international team has succeeded in propagating a commercial hybrid rice strain as a clone through seeds with 95 percent efficiency. This could lower the cost of hybrid rice seed, making high-yielding, disease resistant rice strains available to low-income farmers worldwide. The work was...

phys.org

 

[publiusr]

Clone huh? The words "monoculture" and "potato famine" come to mind.

 

[riggerrob]

Monoculture is a scary concept!

In a related crop, the Canadian dairy cattle industry relies upon a mere 30 bulls to provide all of the sperm for artificial insemination. That is a TINY gene pool!
AI being the dominant method for impregnating dairy cattle in Canada.

 

[edwest4]

Here are the technical details.

High-frequency synthetic apomixis in hybrid rice - Nature Communications

Previously, a proof-of-concept for low frequency synthetic apomixis was established in a laboratory strain of rice by combining MiMe mutations with the egg cell expression of the embryogenic trigger - BBM1. Here, the authors achieve clonal seed formation in hybrid rice with almost full...

www.nature.com