THE genetic secrets of the world’s most popular crops have been revealed in two drafts of the rice genome, promising higher yields and better disease resistance.
In a publicly funded collaboration, a team led by Jun Yu of the Beijing Genomics Institute and the University of Washington Genome Center sequenced the indica subspecies of rice, one of the parents of a hybrid strain that is widely grown in China and throughout Asia. Meanwhile, Stephen Goff and his colleagues at the agribusiness company Syngenta sequenced the japonica subspecies, which is grown in Japan and other temperate regions.
While these draft sequences…
