Rice-breeding breakthrough offers hope of feeding billions

An international team, led by scientists from the University of California, Davis in the US, has succeeded in propagating a commercial hybrid rice strain as a clone through seeds with 95% efficiency.

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First-generation hybrids of crop plants often show higher performance than their parent , a phenomenon known as hybrid vigour. But this does not persist if the hybrids are bred together for a second generation. So, when farmers want to use high-performing hybrid plant varieties, they need to purchase new seed each season.

Rice, the staple crop of half the world's population, is relatively costly to breed as a hybrid for a yield improvement of about 10%. This means that the benefits of rice hybrids have yet to reach many of the world's farmers, said Gurdev Khush, adjunct professor emeritus in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis).

F Working at the International Rice Research Institute from 1967 until retiring to UC Davis in 2002, Khush led efforts to create new high-yield rice varieties, work for which he received the World Food Prize in 1996.

One solution to this would be to propagate hybrids as clones that would remain identical from generation to generation without further breeding. Many wild plants can produce seeds that are clones of themselves, a process called apomixis.