Rice blast in a California rice crop. Credit: UCANR
Researchers from the University of California, Davis, have created a new rice variety that is not only resistant to disease but also demonstrates a higher yield than control groups. By utilizing CRISPR, a powerful genome editing tool, researchers were able to isolate and recreate the gene responsible for the resistance trait.
Rice blast is a disease that heavily impacts crops worldwide and it is known to affect crops in nearly every rice-growing region of the world. By utilizing CRISPR-CAS9 researchers were able to identify a strain with high yield that also showed resistance to three different pathogens, including one that causes rice blast.
Preliminary tests of the newly modified rice were conducted by planting them in heavily diseased plots, the new rice not only showed resistance to the rice blast but also produced five times more yield than the control plants.
The study, published in Nature, highlights the potential future uses of this work to expand on other disease-resistant strains that could have high crop yields. “A lot of these lesion mimic mutants have been discovered and sort of put aside because they have low yield. We’re hoping that people can go look at some of these and see if they can edit them to get a nice balance between resistance and high yield,” said Pamela Ronald - Professor of Plant Pathology at UC Davis. The researchers plan to optimize this gene in more widely-grown rice varieties, as well as expand to other important crops such as wheat.