It’s food for climate conscious consumers. A strain of rice has been genetically engineered to produce less methane.
Rice agriculture is responsible for between 7 and 17 percent of human-induced methane emissions. Sugars produced during photosynthesis leak into the soil via the roots, where they are used up by methane-producing soil microorganisms.
Chuanxin Sun from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala and his colleagues in China and the US have now engineered rice that stores more sugar in its grains and stems. In a three-year-long trial, the rice grew well and led to drops in paddy field methane emissions.
Charles Rice of Kansas State University in Manhattan recently contributed to a 2014 IPCC report on mitigating climate change. If we can halve the methane emissions of rice agriculture, we will have met the targets highlighted in that report, says Rice.
“Given the need to reduce emissions from agriculture while increasing food production and security for the future, it is this kind of research that is needed to meet global challenges,” says Rice.
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But the fact that this rice is genetically modified could prove to be a sticking point in introducing it to farmers and the general population. “It’s quite a sensitive issue”, says Sun. This means farmers can’t culture the low-methane rice at the moment.
However, Sun and his colleagues are attempting to overcome this issue by looking into producing low-methane rice through conventional breeding methods. “We want to use the same principle to try to breed new rice cultivars and try to solve the methane emission problem,” he says.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Genetic engineering creates rice strain that makes less methane
