JAKARTA - Chinese researchers have made a breakthrough in cloning hybrid rice. This finding paves the way to change the way seed production has been done repeatedly every year.
Xinhua, quoted Saturday, July 25, reported that a team led by researcher Wang Kejian from the China National Rice Research Institute successfully identified a natural gene in rice. The gene is named HUAXU.
The study was published in the journal Vita on Tuesday. The results showed that the HUAXU gene in hybrid rice eggs can efficiently trigger partenogenesis and produce haploid offspring.
Partenogenesis is the process of offspring formation from an egg cell without fertilization. While haploid means that the offspring only carries one set of chromosomes.
When combined with the gamete cloning strategy, a number of apomictic lines developed by the team achieved cloning efficiencies approaching 100 percent.
Gametes are reproductive cells, such as eggs or pollen. Apomixis is a way for plants to produce seeds without fertilization, so that the characteristics of the parent plant can be maintained.
In various conditions, the cloning efficiency remains consistent above 99 percent. This result can be seen in different hybrid rice varieties, across several generations, diverse planting populations, to large-scale field trials.
The harvest results are also still at normal levels.
This achievement is referred to as the initial realization of the target "from 1 to 100" for a single-line hybrid rice system. This system is an important step towards the multiplication of hybrid rice that can be passed from one generation to the next.
Cloning efficiency refers to the percentage of seeds produced via artificial apomixis and genetically identical to the parent plant. This size is important to see if the superior traits of hybrid rice can be maintained.
Wang said the three-line and two-line hybrid rice systems widely used today cannot maintain hybrid vigor in the next generation.
Hybrid vigor is the advantage of plants resulting from crosses, for example, stronger, more productive, or have better results than their parents.
The problem is, this superior trait can be broken in the next generation due to genetic segregation. Genetic segregation is the separation of the traits of offspring, so the results of the next generation are not always the same as the initial hybrid plant.
Therefore, the existing system still requires the production of artificial seeds every year between the male sterile cultivar and the fertility recovery cultivar.
The main purpose of the single-track system is to make hybrid plants produce clonal seeds through apomixis. That way, heterosis or the advantages of crossbreeding can be maintained.
In theory, this approach allows a single hybridization to be passed on across generations. This means that a single hybrid seed can be used for sustainable use without the need for annual seed production as in the old system.
Wang said this breakthrough answers a long-standing challenge in plant breeding, namely maintaining the permanent heterosis of hybrid rice through seeds.
Xinhua said this finding has the potential to provide new technological support for global food security.
The English, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and French versions are automatically generated by the AI. So there may still be inaccuracies in translating, please always see Indonesian as our main language. (system supported by DigitalSiber.id)
