New strategy for iron fortification in rice

Iron (Fe) deficiency has become one of the factors limiting plant quality and productivity around the world. IMA (IRONMAN), a family of small peptides, has been recently reported to play a positive role in the Fe deficiency ...

Transgenic rice lowers blood pressure of hypertensive rats

In the future, taking your blood pressure medication could be as simple as eating a spoonful of rice. This "treatment" could also have fewer side effects than current blood pressure medicines. As a first step, researchers ...

Gene boosts rice growth and yield in salty soil

Soil salinity poses a major threat to food security, greatly reducing the yield of agricultural crops. Rising global temperatures are expected to accelerate the buildup of salt in soil, placing an increasing burden on agricultural ...

Sweet route to greater yields

Three years ago, biotechnologists demonstrated in field trials that they could increase the productivity of maize by introducing a rice gene into the plant that regulated the accumulation of sucrose in kernels and led to ...

New rice fights off drought

Scientists at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) have developed strains of rice that are resistant to drought in real-world situations. Published in Plant Biotechnology Journal, the study reports that ...