Scientists find rice gene for grain size and yield

Chinese scientists have identified and cloned a rice gene that influences rice grain weight and yield, which could help scientists develop higher yielding varieties of the world's most important food crop.

Little is known about the genetic mechanisms that determine yield and seed weight in plants, despite tremendous efforts by agricultural scientists in the past decade.

In a study published this week (8 April) in Nature Genetics, lead author Lin Hongxuan and colleagues from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, studied two varieties of rice with highly significant differences in grain size.

After mapping their genomes, they found a gene called GW2 in the large-grain rice that was lacking in the small-grain rice....

Whole article www.checkbiotech.org

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