‘Game changer.’ Scientists are genetically engineering crops to clone themselves

In early summer, unusual pollinators swoop over rice fields in Texas and Arkansas. Small, nimble helicopters fly low and steady so their rotors blow pollen from one row of plants to another. The flights help RiceTec, a plant breeding company, produce seed for high-yielding, robust varieties of rice grown across the southern United States. It’s an expensive and complicated way to create seed. But the effort is worthwhile because the seeds sprout into plants with a mysterious robustness and resilience. The phenomenon, called hybrid vigor, comes from crossing two strains of inbred parents. Why hybrids are superior to normal plants is not clear, but one long-standing hypothesis is that favorable versions of genes from one parent dominate poor-performing, recessive genes from the other. The development of hybrid varieties has boosted the yield of maize, sorghum, and other crops by up to 50% and has resulted in other valuable traits, such as better drought tolerance. But the method is only feasible in some species; there’s no practical way to produce hybrid wheat or soybeans, for example. And when it works, it’s extremely labor intensive. In rice, seed companies must first develop a strain of plants that can’t self-pollinate. Then come the helicopters, which sweep in pollen from a second strain. The process has to be repeated for each new batch of seed to avoid the reshuffling of genes and loss of favorable traits that happens during ordinary sexual reprod...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research