TOKYO: Flooded rice fields are a known source of atmospheric methane — the second most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide — and is said to be responsible for about 20 percent of global warming.
While increasing rice production has always been the primary objective of agricultural researchers, not much attention was paid to reducing methane emission from paddy cultivation. Existing efforts to mitigate rice-associated methane emissions have focussed mainly on agricultural practices – such as water management, fertilizer use, tillage and crop selection – which are labour intensive.
Now a report in the journal Nature says that Chinese scientists, in a ground-breaking demonstration, have grown a new variety of rice called SUSIBA2 that meets the twin goals: it is high yielding and, at the same time, the fields growing this rice emit less methane than conventional varieties.
The new rice variety is the result of collaborative work of scientists from the Fujian Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Hunan Agricultural University in China with researchers in the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington.
The authors generated SUSIBA2 by transferring genes from barley that are responsible for the production of starch in stems and grains using what is called “transcription factor technology”.
