Researchers found new possibility to improve rice productivity

Researchers have discovered a region in the genome of a rice, which seems to have the potential for improving productivity. The Researchers was conducted jointly by the Department of Biotechnology’s National Institute of Plant Genome Research (DBT-NIPGR), ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR-IARI), ICAR-National Rice Research Institute (ICAR-NRRI), Cuttack and University of Delhi South Campus (UDSC).

Rice, being main staple foods across the world, suffers from a problem of low productivity.

To meet the demand of the growing population of India and the world, the production of rice needs to increase significantly by about 50% of current productivity.

The study included sequencing the genomes of four Indian genotypes namely LGR, PB 1121, Sonasal, and Bindli.

The study showed contrasting phenotypes in seed size/weight. The results revealed that the Indian rice germplasms had much more genomic diversity than the estimated so far.

They identified one long (~6 Mb) genomic region, which had an unusually suppressed nucleotide diversity region across the centromere of chromosome 5. They named it a `”low diversity region” or LDR in short.

The region revealed that it had played an important role during the domestication of rice varieties as it was present in most of the cultivated rice genotypes and absent in wild varieties.

It was observed that LDR had played an important role during the domestication of rice varieties as it was present in most of the cultivated rice genotypes and absent in wild varieties.