Hybrid Rice Engineered With CRISPR Can Clone Its Seeds (sciencenews.org)

A gene editing technique has been used to produce asexual rice, which could carry traits such as high yields and drought resistance. From a report: After more than 20 years of theorizing about it, scientists have tweaked a hybrid variety of rice so that some of the plants produce cloned seeds. No plant sex necessary. The feat, described earlier this month in Nature, is encouraging for efforts to feed an increasingly crowded world. Crossing two good varieties of grain can make one fabulous one, combining the best versions of genes to give crops desirable traits such as higher yields. But such hybrid grain marvels often don't pass along those coveted genetic qualities to all seeds during reproduction. So farmers who want consistently higher yields have to pay for new hybrid seeds every year.

This new lab version of hybrid rice would preserve those qualities through self-cloning, says study coauthor Venkatesan Sundaresan, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Davis. Though 400 kinds of plants, including some blackberries and citruses, have developed self-cloning seeds naturally, re-creating those pathways in crop plants has "been harder than anyone expected," Sundaresan says. He and his colleagues got the idea for the new research while studying "how a fertilized egg becomes a zygote, this magical cell that regenerates an entire organism," as Sundaresan puts it. The researchers discovered that modifying two sets of genes caused the japonica rice hybrid called Kitaake to clone its own seeds. First the team found that in a fertilized plant egg, only the male version of a gene called BABY BOOM1 found in sperm triggered the development of a seed embryo. So the scientists inserted a genetic starter switch, called a promoter, that let the female version of the same gene do the same job. No male would be necessary to trigger an embryo's development.

Comments

Why nature abandoned asexual reproduction?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It was there first. Was used by all living things for a long time. Eventually nature abandoned it. (Yes, I am anthropomorphizing nature and attributing to it free wheel and motives. Suck it up. It is the short hand we use. )

Why? Germs adapt. At every vulnerability they thrive. Asexual reproduction results in genetically identical organisms highly vulnerable to diseases and parasites. Already we have very few species (as few as 6) providing 60% of the calories used by the entire human population. We are already very vulnerable to something like Irish Potato famine, only orders of magnitude more devastating. And, replace these species with genetically identical clones? ....

But, it would be the dream of agri-chem business. I could see the dollar signs blinking on the executives "they are going to need more pesticides? and fungicides? Wow!". They will write staid professional dry proposals and forecasts, "Monsato believes there is great potential for the company due these scientific breakthroughs and development" in their prospecti and conference call guidance.

Re:Why nature abandoned asexual reproduction?

[Kokuyo]

That's one scenario.

One reason why Monsanto might not be happy about this is that farmers won't have a need to buy new seeds every year.

Also if you can selectively modify the genes, what keeps you from adapting next year's crops in one fell swoop instead of waiting for nature to evolution the vulnerability out over ten centuries?
If we get good at this, we might actually outperform nature by several orders of magnitude.

There are certainly downsides to this, some of which nobody even thinks of right now. However, in the long run I'm not sure we'll have much of a choice. Population probably will level out at 11 billion at some point but feeding that many people isn't a piece of cake by any means.

Re:Why nature abandoned asexual reproduction?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a real risk in the extreme monoculture of cloned foodcrops. I still miss the taste of the Gros Michel banana of my childhood. The Cavendish banana is resistant to the Panama disease of the 50s and 60s, but a new strain has emerged that does affect Cavendish. 99% of export bananas are Cavendish. But probably not for long...

Re:Why nature abandoned asexual reproduction?

[DRJlaw]

Exactly. Bananas use asexual reproduction. ( info for those who are unaware of the connection)

Bananas do not use asexual reproduction. Human producers seeking a fruit that can be easily harvested and shipped internationally have propogated a sterile mutant variety that, being a sterile mutant, doesn't have a wide range of alternatives.

 

Sounds like an invasive nightmare

[DalM]

Hmm... Plants that can grow, reproduce itself, grow ,reproduce itself, grow, reproduce itself, grow, reproduce itself, infinium.

That sound like a cancer.

Re:And at Monsanto -

[LifesABeach]

I was thinking, "Zombie rice, what could possibly go wrong?"

Re:Only a redneck

[Immerman]

Kudzu
Russian thistle
Salt-cedar
A few of the invasive plants that are causing increasing environmental damage in the U.S.
Heck - try to go hiking in Oregon. Blackberries have taken over practically every unshaded, untended spot in the state to the aggravation of all. The man who introduced them is cursed regularly.

Any species introduced into an area where it can thrive, and where there are no effective predators to keep it in check, will be invasive. They displace the native species, thereby also harming every other species that relied on them for food or shelter. The knock-on effects from that can be ecologically devastating.

Re:And at Monsanto -

[smooth wombat]

Still stupid enough to believe that myth, eh?

You mean the myth of reality?

When farmers purchase a patented seed variety, they sign an agreement that they will not save and replant seeds produced from the seed they buy from us. More than 325,000 farmers a year buy seed under these agreements in the United States. Other seed companies sell their seed under similar provisions. They understand the basic simplicity of the agreement, which is that a business must be paid for its product. The vast majority of farmers understand and appreciate our research and are willing to pay for our inventions and the value they provide. They donâ(TM)t think it's fair that some farmers donâ(TM)t pay.

A very small percentage of farmers do not honor this agreement. Monsanto does become aware, through our own actions or through third-parties, of individuals who are suspected of violating our patents and agreements. Where we do find violations, we are able to settle most of these cases without ever going to trial. In many cases, these farmers remain our customers. Sometimes however, we are forced to resort to lawsuits. This is a relatively rare circumstance, with 147 lawsuits filed since 1997 in the United States. This averages about 8 per year for the past 18 years. To date, only 9 cases have gone through full trial. In every one of these instances, the jury or court decided in our favor.

Here is one such case:

The Bowman case has come about after the 75-year-old farmer bought soybeans from a grain elevator near his farm in Indiana and used them to plant a late-season second crop. He then used some of the resulting seeds to replant such crops in subsequent years. Because he bought them from a third party which put no restrictions on their use, Bowman has argued he is legally able to plant and replant them and that Monsanto's patent on the seeds' genes does not apply.

Monsanto, which has won its case against Bowman in lower courts, vociferously disagrees. It argues that it needs its patents in order to protect its business interests and provide a motivation for spending millions of dollars on research and development of hardier, disease-resistant seeds that can boost food yields.