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taylorvich [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-rice-lines-africa-virus.html [phys.org]

Rice yellow mottle virus (RYMV) is responsible for high crop losses in Africa, particularly among small-scale farmers. A research team has now produced rice lines that are resistant to the disease by means of genome editing.

The rice varieties, the development of which the team describes in Plant Biotechnology Journal, are a preliminary step toward being able to generate resistant locally adapted elite varieties for small-scale food producers in Africa.

RYMV is an RNA virus spread by beetles and direct leaf-to-leaf contact. In Africa, where the majority of producers farm plots of land barely one hectare in size, between ten and one hundred percent of the rice harvests are regularly lost to this virus. This makes it a life-threatening problem for the poorest farmers.

There is no effective protection against the virus. "The only real protection is to develop rice varieties that possess a resistance gene against RYMV, which would make the plant invulnerable," says Dr. Yugander Arra, lead author of the study now published in Plant Biotechnology Journal.

A research team from the Institute for Molecular Physiology at HHU (headed by Professor Dr. Wolf B. Frommer) and the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) in Montpellier, France, has developed such resistant rice lines.

Three resistance genes are currently known; mutations in just one gene, RYMV1, 2, and 3, are sufficient to achieve resistance. The resistant form rymv2 occurs in poor-yielding African rice (Oryza glaberrima) varieties. RYMV2, also known as CPR5.1, encodes an essential protein from the pores of the cell nucleus.

In the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the loss of the only gene copy of CPR5 results in a broad spectrum of resistance to viruses, bacteria, and fungi. However, growth is severely restricted; the plants exhibit spontaneous lesions and produce low yields. So, it was important to test whether rymv2 resistance could be transferred to other rice varieties without negative consequences.

In Africa, other high-yield rice varieties based on the Asian species Oryza indica are mainly used, and these do not have the resistance gene. Inserting the relevant gene is, however, not a particularly promising approach as the descendants of such "inter-species" hybrids are highly sterile and, therefore, cannot reproduce and pass on the resistance easily.

Using the CRISPR/Cas genome editing method, the research group has now shown that mutations of the RYMV2 gene can be produced in an Asian rice variety that make it resistant to the virus in a similar way to the African form. In the next step, the aim is to edit relevant African elite varieties in the same way to make them available to African small-scale producers. Helping these farmers is the goal of the international research consortium "Healthy Crops," which is headed by HHU.

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