Chinese scientists’ gene discovery paves way for machine hybrid rice seed production

Scientists have found a gene that could help fully mechanise production of hybrid rice seeds, saving time, labour and waste

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Scientists have identified a gene that is key to mechanising the production of hybrid rice seeds. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 6:00am, 13 Jun 2024Updated: 9:45am, 13 Jun 2024

Chinese scientists have identified a gene that could enable the fully mechanised production of hybrid rice seeds, bypassing current time and labour-intensive manual methods that limit breeding efforts.

By creating rice lines with both smaller and larger grain sizes, the researchers found it then became a simple matter of mechanically separating the hybrid seeds from the rest using a sieve.

“Hybrid rice has achieved high grain yield and greatly contributes to food security, but the manual-labour-intensive hybrid seed production process limits fully mechanised hybrid rice breeding,” the team from the Chinese Academy of Science, Hainan Seed Industry Laboratory and China National Rice Research Institute, wrote in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Plants on June 3.

“For next-generation hybrid seed production, the use of small-grain male sterile lines to mechanically separate small hybrid seeds from mixed harvest is promising,” they said.

The challenge was finding a gene that could enable a rice line to have a small grain size without reducing the seed number and yield.

However, the team discovered this was possible with the “ideal grain-size gene” GSE3. Field tests showed that rice lines with the gene did not negatively impact hybrid seed numbers; in fact, it led to a 21 to 38 per cent increase.

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