Increased public-sector involvement in crop development -- much of which has been ceded to companies over the past decades as seeds evolved into patentable commodities -- will be needed to apply increasingly cheap biotech improvements to subsistence crops like cassava, for example, Baulcombe said.
"For many of those [crops], there may not be an incentive for companies to get involved," he said.
Such innovation is required. Food security will be one of the pressing issues of the next half-century as the world's population rises by several billion. That many hungry mouths will necessitate higher yielding and better crops, and advanced GM crops will need to be a part of this mix, the Royal Society said.
However, since many developing nations lack the apparatus to regulate GM crops, molecular breeding may be the quickest way to carve out immediate gains for at-risk populations, like frequently flooded rice farmers in Asia, scientists say.
Scuba rice
Asian rice farmers get little warning before floods.
More than 3 billion people in the world depend on rice as their primary food, and nearly one-fourth of the world's crop is grown in rain-fed lowland plots prone to seasonal and sustained flash floods. Even the most common, hardy varieties of rice will die after four days spent underwater, starved of the carbon dioxide and oxygen they need for photosynthesis.
Each year, lowland floods in South Asia destroy 4 million tons of rice, causing chronic food insecurity for subsistence farmers across the region. More than 15 million hectares -- an area the size of Bangladesh -- is commonly stricken, and the lost rice is enough to feed 30 million people, said Pamela Ronald, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Davis.
Now imagine if this rice could maintain its traditional qualities, like its robust yield, but could survive flooded conditions for weeks.
"[That] rice has the potential to fill this incredibly huge gap," Ronald said.
Using molecular breeding, Ronald and Dave Mackill, a crop scientist at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, have done just that, developing multiple strains of rice that can survive for more than two weeks in flooded conditions. Varieties of the submergent-resistant rice -- nicknamed "scuba rice" -- have already been introduced in India and the Philippines, with expansion into Bangladesh expected within a month, Mackill said.
"This work has been going on for a long time, and this is the time that we're getting a lot of results in [rice] that can go to the farmers now," he said.
The mass deployment of scuba rice is the culmination of more than a decade of research for Mackill, who long ago identified a gene in rice's DNA, known as Sub1A, that seemed to strongly influence how a weedy but flood-resistant rice variety in India -- rejected because it had a low yield and poor taste -- could survive so much longer than normal varieties.
With molecular backcrossing, Mackill, Ronald and their many colleagues were then able to breed this overexpressed gene into rice already popular in India, such as the legendary Swarna variety. (IRRI has adapted nine varieties so far.) Previous attempts to backcross this trait with conventional breeding had always failed, reducing Swarna's taste or yield.
"Conventional breeders can only bring in one trait at a time that are very simple traits," Ronald said. The exciting aspect of submergence was that they could bring in what is known as a "quantitative trait locus" -- a more genetically complex region that influences measurable changes to the crop. "This is one of the very first instances where we could tackle" such a locus, she said.
Rice has proved to be the best grain to be manipulated with marker-assisted breeding, Mackill said. It has a limited number of genes -- it was the first crop to have its genome sequenced, earlier this decade -- and the individual genes tend to exert strong influences. Such individually powerful genes can be rare in other plants.
"That's one of the most difficult things to find in any crop," Mackill said.
Yielding soy
Partly because other grains are not so easily influenced by a few genes, molecular breeding is not as popular in public breeding circles as was hoped a decade ago, when it first arose. Besides scuba rice, most other published applications have been used for disease or pest resistance, which are genetically simpler to breed.
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6 Comments
Add CommentWhen you refer to "increasing soy's production up to a bushel", do you mean per plant, per hectare, per acre, per square mile ... ?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPaul Ehrlich saw a pending population crash that didn’t happen. The crash didn’t happen because of the advances in agriculture. Commercial fertilizer, plant breeding, and genetically engineered crops have brought about abundant crops that are sufficient to feed our world’s human population of 6.8 billion
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGenetically engineered (GE) crops are a lifesaving breakthrough for the developing world because plants have been created that contains all the essential nutrients for human health. It is a tragedy that well meaning “greens” in Europe have poisoned the minds of Africans against the use of GE crops. This campaign has caused the starvation of untold numbers of Africans.
The greens and organic farmers need to look into this biology and accept molecular breeding and GE seed production as they are engineered to produce the hardiest, most nutritious and non-allergenic foods.
We need to cope with feeding a growing human population on a planet that is losing agricultural land to climate change. Our hope is that molecular breeding and genetic engineering may increase our crop productivity to keep pace with the nutrition needs of our world’s population.
Animal breeders could do similar things to help prevent genetic disorders like hip dysplasia caused by excessive and unscrupulous inbreeding.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBushels per acre is the standard unit of grain yield for soybeans in the US. One bushel equal 60 pounds of grain at 13% moisture.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problem here is that there are unknown nutrients and other chemicals/compounds that are beneficial to human health. These nutrients haven't yet been discovered or identified.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are millions of people out there who hate monsanto and everything they stand for - agent orange, gm, round-up and else. Given this fact and the economic need (if there is one, that isn�t made by ourselfes), molecular breeding will hopefully be, what GMOs want to stand for: A clean, new way without any impact to nature or our health.
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