Speedy crop breeding to help Japanese rice growers January 27,
2012 1 Comment The devastating tsunami that hit northeastern
parts of Japan last March left thousands of acres of farmland
damaged by saltwater. Much of this agricultural land was paddy
fields, which were left with up to 25 cm of sand and mud
deposited and highly saline conditions resulting from
evaporation of the seawater. Scientists from the Sainsbury
Laboratory in Norwich, UK, in collaboration with Iwate
Biotechnology Research Centre in Japan, are screening rice
varieties to find those that can grow in salty conditions. They
are doing this using their new MutMap method, which provides a
much quicker way of finding new crop varieties than traditional
breeding methods. In the past it has been slow to use genetics
to identify individual plants that have the genetic code for
desired traits because it is often a combination of many
different genes that leads to these traits. The traditional way
of creating a plant that has specific features such as