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DNA Code of Rice Crack by International team of Scientists
Cracking of DNA code for Rice will help enhancing production of crop signficantly in next 10 years.
An international
team of scientists decoded the genetic code of rice,
research that should speed improvements in a crop
that feeds more than half the world's population.
Rice is the first crop
plant to have its genome decoded and sequenced, which
means scientists identified virtually all the 389
million
chemical building blocks of its DNA. Certain sequences
of these building blocks form genes, like letters
spelling words.
The advance will help
breeders produce new rice varieties with traits such
as higher yield, improved nutritional content and
better resistance to disease and pests, said one of
the project's leaders, W. Richard McCombie of Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.
"I would think
this is going to help people find genes and probably
enhance the crop in well under 10 years," McCombie
said.
The work is reported
in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature by the International
Rice Genome Sequencing Project, which was established
in 1998 and includes scientists from 10 nations. The
effort was led by Japanese researchers.
In the Nature report,
scientists estimated rice contains 37,544 genes but
said that figure will no doubt be revised with further
research.
Humans, by contrast, have only 20,000 to 25,000 genes.
They also said having
the genome sequence in hand will be crucial for breeding
and biotechnology advances to increase rice yield,
noting that by one estimate the world's rice production
must increase by 30 percent over the next 20 years
to keep up with demand.
Besides Japan
and the United States, participating scientists came
from Brazil, China, France, India, Korea, Taiwan,
Thailand and the United Kingdom.
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