Could this new stress-tolerant rice from China boost shrinking crop yields?

Food scientists in China have found a new way to regulate plant hormones that could hold promise for boosting the yields and quality of crops such as rice, as global warming shrinks the world’s available agricultural land.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University discovered that they could grow more stress-tolerant rice even in saline soil by regulating a hormone called gibberellin with a “new post-Green Revolution gene”.

“Soil alkalinisation and global warming are predicted to pose major challenges to agriculture in the future, as they continue to accelerate, markedly reducing global arable land and crop yields,” the team wrote in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature on Wednesday.

“In this study, we have proposed a previously unknown concept that precise regulation of gibberellin at optimal medium levels is the preferred solution to confer high grain yield and tolerance to alkali – thermal stresses simultaneously.”

The Green Revolution of the 20th century saw the spread of high-yielding crop varieties – notably wheat and rice – by incorporating semi-dwarf genes, which allowed for shorter and more compact varieties with increased yields.

The discovery of genes such as the semi-dwarf 1, which modulates gibberellic acid biosynthesis, helped increase food production and security. However, poor agricultural management practices such as the overuse of pesticides and fertilisers have led to soil degradation.