The order of three hundred and eighty-nine chemicals which comprise the DNA of rice, the world’s number one food crops have
been identified and decoded by scientists making it the first crop plant genome to be entirely sequenced. The
completed genome is published in the August 17 edition of Nature: the paper summarizes the structure and function of the genes that define the rice crop.
The knowledge of the plant’s genome is a huge step in the field of agriculture as it makes it possible to analyze genes accountable for its traits. The demand of rice is expected to increase by about 30% in the next twenty years and so rice production is required to keep up with this inflation. This goal can be easily attained with the newly found genetic information: scientists can now alter rice to bring forth more produce, enhance nutritional composition and improve its resistance to diseases more than customary breeding equipments.
Due to the fact that rice has similar sets of genes with assorted major foods like wheat, barley, maize (corn), and rye, their genetic sequencing will now be relatively easy and they in turn can be manipulated positively to influence their respective yields, production, nutritional content and disease resistance.
The decoding of rice’s genome sequence was performed by a multinational group of researchers from the following ten
countries: Brazil, Taiwan, South Korea, India, Thailand, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and the United States which constitute the International Rice Genome Project. The project was originally designed to be completed in a ten-year span but due to collaboration in sharing data, material and technology from the different countries, it was completed just after six years; Monsanto and Syngenta, two private companies also contributed to this rapid revolutionary, scientific breakthrough.
The clone-by-clone method was used to crack rice’s genetic code.