Grant funds development of naturally nutritious rice
A new research project aims to make rice more nutritious through
“biofortifying”—causing the plant to take up essential nutrients while
growing—rather than fortification during processing.
Mary Lou Guerinot
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The advent of the cultivation of grains was a boon to humankind, giving
humans a type of food that could be stored and would sustain them through
drought and famine. Grains, however, lack many of the nutrients needed to
sustain life.
A new research project co-led by Mary Lou Guerinot, the Ronald and Deborah
Harris Professor in the Biological
Sciences, is aimed at making rice—which supplies an estimated quarter of
the calories humans consume each day—a more nutritious food source.
Guerinot is the project’s co-principal investigator. David Salt, a
horticulture professor at Purdue University, is the principal investigator.
Shannon Pinson, a research geneticist at Texas A&M University and the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, is co-principal investigator.
Some food is fortified with nutrients when it’s processed, but very little
of that food ever reaches the world’s poor. By contrast, Guerinot and her
colleagues want to find genes that help the plants take up more essential
nutrients from their environments as they grow. This makes for not only a more
nutritious food source but also a healthier and more resilient plant. “We feel
biofortification is the way to go,” she says. “Rather than add nutrients to the
food after it’s grown, we’d like them to enter the food as it grows.”
Funded by a four-year, $5.5 million grant from the National Science
Foundation, the group will first analyze some 1,800 different rice varieties
for the presence of 18 elements, including those helpful to humans, such as
iron, zinc, potassium, and manganese, and such harmful trace elements as
arsenic, cadmium, and lead. They will make this information freely available to
the research community.
The bulk of the research, however, will be a painstaking study of the
varieties that are highest in iron and zinc, to identify the genes that are
responsible for the uptake and storage of those elements. The group is focusing
on these elements because billions of people suffer from iron or zinc
deficiencies, resulting in stunted growth, impaired cognitive function, and
other health problems.
Guerinot and colleagues have already successfully identified the genes
responsible for iron uptake from the soil in Arabidopsis, a small
flowering plant in the mustard family that is widely used as a model organism
in plant biology.
In addition to possibly leading to the development of rice varieties that
are higher in iron and zinc, the project could shed light on how plants turn on
or off their ability to take up and store a whole array of elements, including
harmful ones. This could be helpful to countries like Bangladesh, where rice is
contaminated by the high levels of arsenic that naturally occur in the water.
This knowledge also could help researchers seeking plants that can remove
toxins from the environment.
By REBECCA BAILEY
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