Supercharged rice: the answer to famine?

‘About a billion people worldwide currently live on less than a dollar a day, and 850 million live in hunger,’ explained Dr Hibberd. ‘By 2050, the demands of increasing population growth and urbanisation are predicted to result in mass malnutrition. One way to alleviate this problem is to develop higher-yielding rice.’

In an innovative approach, the C₄ Rice Consortium plans to reconfigure the photosynthetic pathway used by rice. Some plants are capable of converting the energy from sunlight into chemical energy more efficiently than others. This mechanism, known as C₄photosynthesis because the carbon is fixed into four-carbon sugars rather than the usual three-carbon compound, can produce higher yields. The goal of the Consortium is to convert rice from a C₃ to a C₄ pathway.

Cambridge’s contribution is to unpick and rebuild the C₄ apparatus at the molecular level. Dozens of genes are known to be involved, and alterations will be required in the biochemistry of photosynthesis, leaf anatomy and cell biology. The collective expertise of the Consortium will be required to construct and test the prototypes of a C₄ rice plant. If the basic science is successful, the first varieties will be available 10–15 years later.

‘There is biological precedent for changing from a C₃ to a C₄ pathway in plants, since it’s known to have evolved independently many times,’ said Dr Hibberd. ‘The challenge is how to repeat the process in rice in the necessary time frame to avoid potential food shortages in the future.’

For more information, please contact Dr Julian Hibberd (julian.hibberd@plantsci.cam.ac.uk). Dr Hibberd was recently identified by Nature magazine as one of five ‘crop researchers who could change the world’.