BREAKTHROUGH IN CROP BREEDING UNVEILED

Yahoo! News.  23 January 2012.  Scientists in Britain and Japan have unveiled a fast-track way towards breeding crops with higher yields or resistance to climate change.  Early beneficiaries should be Japanese farmers who need salt-loving rice plants after their fields were submerged in last year’s tsunami.

The technique unveiled Sunday, which does not use genetic modification, pinpoints DNA variants which confer specific qualities in a plant.  Armed with this knowledge, breeders can then use classic methods to splice these genes into an existing strain.  Right now, it can take up to five or even 10 years to develop a strain, which is known as a cultivar. But the “MutMat” approach should speed this marathon to a sprint of little more than a year, say its inventors.  “Essentially, it helps to get to the needle in the haystack faster,” Sophien Kamoun, a professor at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, eastern England, told AFP.

The method, reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology, focussed on a Japanese wild rice cultivar called Hitomebore.  read more