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Monsanto announces breakthrough in mapping rice genes |
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April 5, 2000
BEIJING, APR 4 (AP) - Researchers working for biotech giant Monsanto announced Tuesday that they have basically identified the genetic makeup of rice, a development they say will lead to better quality, higher yield crops and promote world food security.
A laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle, working on contract for St. Louis, Missouri-based Monsanto, used a gene sequencing technique to map roughly 85 percent of the genetic code for rice. To help speed work on the final code, Monsanto says it will give the data to the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project, a 10-country consortium.
The breakthrough is expected to enable scientists to custom-engineer rice strains resistant to drought, salinity and insects. The results also will form the basis for study of other grass species such as corn, sorghum and wheat, said Leroy Hood, head of the laboratory where the research was conducted.
"When we decipher the rice genome, we will have the equivalent of an encyclopedia that contains the instructions for creating a life form," Hood said, likening the current level of progress to an encyclopedia with "occasional words misspelled or occasional words deleted."
"It is the beginning of being able to engineer rice plants that have higher yields, have greater food quality, that are more protected against drought and against insects."
The breakthrough comes as farmers in industrialized countries, reacting to consumer resistance, are cutting back on acreage sown to genetically engineered crops.
Bioengineered foods are created by splicing genes from the DNA of an organism - plant, animal or microbe - and inserting it into another organism's genes. Such techniques have raised worries that genetically modified organisms could harm humans and animals, and may cause other vegetation to mutate or create other ecological damage.
The companies that are developing the seeds - Monsanto, DuPont, Aventis, Novartis and AstraZeneca - insist they are safe. In developing countries like China, which supports a fifth of the world's population with only 7 percent of the world's arable land, the need to ensure that food production keeps pace with population growth has tended to outweigh worries about potential risks from genetically modified crops.
"This technology is very important for food security, especially like China, India and Africa," said Chen Zhangliang, vice president of Peking University and head of the college's Pioneer Lab. "This technology will be a very common technology in 10 years' time. Unfortunately, right now, it's a very dark period, a very difficult time."
Rice is the world's most common staple food and China is the world's largest rice producer. In 1999, it harvested 200.7 million tons out of a global rice harvest of 588.7 million tons. In Asia, where the population is expected to increase by 1 billion by 2020, higher yields could help stave off future food shortages.
Chinese scientists invited by Monsanto to attend a news conference announcing the rice genome breakthrough said the research could, in four to five years, enable Chinese farmers to plant crops with much higher yields.
They applauded the company's decision to provide data obtained through private research to the public domain.
"This will make a great contribution to our own research," said Chen. "This will save us huge amounts of money and huge amounts of time."
Monsanto officials would not say how much money the company spent on the rice genome project, describing such data as "competitive information." Within a few weeks, the company plans to provide the research results to Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forests and Fisheries, lead agency in the International Rice Genome Sequence Project, for distribution to other members.
Researchers outside the project also will be able to obtain the data at no cost. In return, Monsanto said it expects results in mapping the remaining parts of the rice genome to remain public. The company also expects to negotiate non-exclusive licensing rights for any commercial applications, said Charles M. Martin, Monsanto's vice president for corporate communications in China.
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