The draft sequences of the rice genome were published this month, providing a window into one of the world’s most important food crops that will help increase the pace of advances in traditional breeding and genetic engineering of rice and other crops.
Obviously the decoding of the rice genome has a lot of implications for rice, but it will also yield important information about other grasses such as wheat, maize, barley and sorghum. According to researcher Stephen Goff,
There are about 1,000 traits that are mapped by breeders already to specific chromosomes. Now, we have the genes associated with those traits. We can speed up breeding in rice and all the other grasses.
Knowing which gene codes for resistance to bacterial pathogens in rice, for example, will also tip off researchers about which gene does the same thing for wheat, hopefully leading to advances across the board in improving food security.
Source:
Rice data to boost food security. Johnathan Amos, The BBC, April 4, 2002.