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鈥檚 team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences鈥� Institute of Genetics in Beijing compared genes of normal rice plants with those of mutant plants that grow just a mother stem or 鈥渃ulm鈥�. The mutant plants had abnormal copies of a gene the researchers call MOC1, short for 鈥渕onoculm 1鈥�. When they added extra corrected copies of this gene, the plants grew more branches than usual (Nature, vol 422, p 62).
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