PSP RESEARCH OVERVIEW - CROP TRANSFORMATION (Cont.)

'Clean-gene' technology for rice

Half the world’s population depends on rice as its major source of nutritional calories. Rice transformation technologies hold great promise for increasing rice productivity, especially in areas where rice farmers have little means to counter damage caused by pests and disease. The absence of classic plant breeding solutions (limited genetic sources of resistance available) and the limitations of chemical treatments (not economically feasible under low-input sustainable systems and extreme damage to the environment) present an excellent opportunity for biotechnological solutions.

PSP-funded research has been successful in finding a way of producing transgenic crops that are free of undesirable selectable marker genes (such as antibiotic resistance genes) and containing simple transgenic loci. This overcomes a constraint to the employment of genetic engineering: the perceived risks from introducing antibiotic resistance genes, which are only included because they are part of the transformation process, into the genetically modified crop.

Visit the PSP project database and virtual library for further details of the above project.

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