Reading the rice genome starts a new chapter in food science.

Abstract

The world's rice growers, who cover 11% of the world's arable land surface with their crop, giving half o f the world's population 80% of their diets, have struck lucky with a fluke of nature. The genome of rice is the smallest of all those of the cereal crops, less than 1% of the wheat genome, for example, but it is similar enough to wheat and other rich-world crops that companies and research institutes have been racing to sequence it. Some scientists have called it the "Rosetta stone" for cereals, after the ancient stone inscribed in three languages that allowed historians to read Egyptian hieroglyphics for the first time. And in April separate publications in Science by the Swiss-based company Syngenta, and the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) and others, read out most of the rice Rosetta stone. The result: the draft sequence of most of rice's 430 million base pairs along its 12 chromosomes. Monsanto had produced an earlier draft of 60% of the rice genome, but these results--using a quicker, rough draft technique called "whole genome shotgun" leave those data standing, along with those of the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP). Syngenta have sequenced Oryza japonica, and the BGI has sequenced Oryza indica, which together cover most Asian rices, and are similar to the rices of Africa and America. Not only that: although a private company, Syngenta has promised to collaborate with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Manila during the crucial 10-year process of "functional mapping" of the genome. During this time the raw data are turned into a sequence of clearly identified functional genes. The BGI has already made its data freely available worldwide. Ron Cantrell, Director of IRRI, told the Bulletin "we would like to encourage Syngenta to share their data freely with as many public researchers working in the developing world as possible. While their genomic data may not be merged with out own genome database, it should still be able to be accessed independently by rice scientists in resource-poor countries. It will then be up to researchers to make sense of all the rice genome databases that now exist--Syngenta's, BGI's, Monsanto's, and IRGSP's." Cantrell said that while Syngenta's willingness to share at least some of its data should be recognized, he was keen to encourage the company to go further, adding that the firm was continuing to develop its approach to sharing the results of its rice research. He had been worried when he had first heard that the inventors of vitamin-A rich, genetically modified (GM) "golden rice" (Ingo Potrykus of the Institute for Plant Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland, and Peter Beyer of the Centre for Applied Biosciences, University of Freiburg, Germany) had decided to involve Syngenta, in their quest to get this rice made available. "I thought, boy, that's going to really slow things down. At IRRI we had found that as we tried to deal with private companies, they didn't understand what we were trying to do. So I wasn't thrilled." "But as the old story goes", Cantrell said, "I've come away with a different point of view. We've found Syngenta helpful in trying to work out all of the intellectual property issues in negotiating with this golden rice technology; they clearly understood the need for new technology to address issues of poverty, and I thought they were really trying to be helpful. So we have had a quite a positive experience with the company." In fact, Syngenta can well afford to be generous with rice. It will make its profits from the application of the understanding--and genes--that it finds in rice to more profitable crops such as wheat, barley, and maize. All the cereal genomes, according to Science, "have the same genes in the same order", but the profitable ones seem to have more DNA, making their genomes so large it would have been impractical to sequence them. …