BUMPER rice harvests could grow from the discovery of a gene that makes rice plants branch.
Rice plants must have an optimal number of branches to yield the most grain. Too few, and there are not enough grain heads; too many, and the yield of each one plummets.
To find out what controls this, Jiayang Li’s team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Genetics in Beijing compared genes of normal rice plants with those of mutant plants that grow just a mother stem or “culm”. The mutant plants had abnormal copies of a gene the researchers call MOC1, short for “monoculm 1”. When they…
