Los Baños,
Philippines
July 26, 2006
A major
international scientific effort was launched last week to
develop and use a radical new approach to boost rice production
and avoid potential rice shortages, or even future famine.
Scientists have been working on
different aspects of the approach since the early 1990s. But new
knowledge generated by the sequencing of the rice genome is
allowing researchers for the first time to discuss how they
might work together to completely reconfigure what’s known as
the engine of rice production, the plant’s photosynthetic
system.
“If you think of the rice plant
as a car, what we were talking about is really supercharging the
engine,” said IRRI crop ecologist John Sheehy, convener of a
workshop on C4 Rice – Supercharging the Rice Engine, held at the
Philippines-based International
Rice Research Institute (IRRI) on 17-21 July. “The
photosynthetic process is the engine of growth for the rice
plant, so, if we can improve that, then the whole plant
benefits.”
“If we continue with the car
analogy, the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which
resulted in high-yielding semidwarf rice varieties, focused on
providing a new, more compact body for the rice plant,” Dr.
Sheehy added. “But we have never really got under the hood and
tried to improve the engine, or the photosynthetic efficiency,
of the rice plant. It’s going to be an enormously complex and
difficult challenge, but we think that with all the new
knowledge we have about the rice plant it can be done.”
Many of the world’s leading
experts on photosynthesis attended the five-day workshop. They
were warned that unless global rice production continues to
increase steadily—despite fewer resources such as land, labor,
and capital—millions of people could fall backward into poverty.
More than 3 billion people depend on rice as their main food
source each day, including most of the world’s poor.
“Frankly, we have almost
exhausted the traditional methods of increasing rice production,
especially considering the environmental challenges we face such
as climate change,” IRRI Director General Robert Zeigler said.
“This generation must work to assure food security not only for
ourselves, but for future generations as well. We must find and
develop big new ideas to help us further increase rice
production while using less land, labor, and water.”
To meet this important challenge,
scientists at the workshop focused on enhancing the rice plant’s
photosynthetic efficiency, or what’s known scientifically as
converting rice from a C3 plant to a C4 plant, where the “C”
refers to the carbon captured by photosynthesis for growth. To
do this, C4 plants—such as maize—use solar energy more
effectively for growth.
Dr. Sheehy compared the potential
impact of successfully transforming rice from a C3 to a C4 plant
as even greater than the production of the semidwarf rice plants
that sparked the Green Revolution. “If we can successfully
develop a C4 rice plant, the implications and potential impact
will be huge—it’s one of the great scientific challenges facing
people working in the plant sciences.”
The experts at the workshop
suggested that it will probably take another three to four years
to achieve the “proof-of-concept” needed before an international
consortium of scientists will have assembled the tools and
materials to begin constructing the prototypes of a C4 rice
plant. It will be another 10–15 years after that before the
first varieties are available.
“Considering the urgent rice
production challenges we face, we must start now on this
work—there’s no time to lose,” Dr. Sheehy said.
The International Rice Research
Institute (IRRI) is the world’s leading rice research and
training center. Based in the Philippines and with offices in 10
other Asian countries, it is an autonomous, nonprofit
institution focused on improving the well-being of present and
future generations of rice farmers and consumers, particularly
those with low incomes, while preserving natural resources. IRRI
is one of 15 centers funded through the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an association of
public and private donor agencies. Please visit the CGIAR
website (www.cgiar.org)
for more information.
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