New Rice Variety Created By CRISPR Gene-Edit Technology Can Yield Up To 31% More Grain Per Crop

Rice is one of the most plentiful food grains in the world, yet there's only so much rice a crop in the field can produce. At the same time, world hunger is on the rise, affecting over 10 per cent of the global population, according to a UN report.

To overcome this natural farming barrier, and to feed more people around the world, scientists have created a new variety of rice which can increase grains per crop by a whopping 31%.

Scientists have successfully come up with a simple technique to edit a rice plant -- at a genetical level -- and make it produce more rice grains per crop.

According to an Engadget report, through the use of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing scientists have created a rice plant variety that produces 25 to 31 percent more grain per plant in real world tests -- obviously, a lot more than what you'd otherwise get through planting a natural variety of rice.

The CRISPR gene-editing technique manipulated with genes of the rice plant that stopped growth. But the same gene was also responsible for improving tolerances towards life threats like less water, salt content, etc.

Does this mean scientists created a variety of rice that can produce more grain but may not be able to sustain in a real-world farm? Not really, because they exploited genetic duplicates and redundancies present in plants -- not just this variety of rice -- and came up with an editing technique that maximized all the benefits with none of the potential drawbacks.

How is CRISPR gene-edited rice different from other GM rice varieties? Other techniques rely on borrowing genes from other plants -- like barley, but CRISPR is a lot more pure at editing the rice gene, with no additives whatsoever.

Before this gene-edited rice goes into full production and gets introduced to real-world farms, there are ethical concerns about genetically modified plants that need to be addressed. But there's no doubt, that if this variety of gene-edited rice is successful in the real-world, it may make a very real dent towards reducing the number of hungry people in the world.