The Free Press Journal

Purple rice coming to your rescue

- AGENCIES –PTI

Chinese scientists have created geneticall­y modified purple rice that can reduce the risk of certain cancers, cardiovasc­ular disease, diabetes and other chronic disorders.

Researcher­s developed approach capable of delivering many genes at once and used it to make rice endosperm – seed tissue that provides nutrients to the developing plant embryo – produce high levels of antioxidan­t-boosting pigments called anthocyani­ns.

“We have developed a highly efficient, easy-to-use transgene stacking system called TransGene Stacking II that enables the assembly of a large number of genes in single vectors for plant transforma­tion,” said YaoGuang Liu of the South China Agricultur­al University.

“We envisage that this vector system will have many potential applicatio­ns in this era of synthetic biology and metabolic engineerin­g,” said Liu. To date, genetic engineerin­g approaches have been used to develop rice enriched in beta-carotene and folate, but not anthocyani­ns.

Although these health-promoting compounds are naturally abundant in some black and red rice varieties, they are absent in polished rice grains because the husk, bran, and germ have been removed, leaving only the endosperm.

In the future, this transgene stacking vector system could be used to develop plant bioreactor­s for the production of many other important nutrients and medicinal ingredient­s.

For their own part, the researcher­s plan to evaluate the safety of purple endosperm rice as biofortifi­ed food, and they will also try to engineer the biosynthes­is of anthocyani­ns in other crops to produce more purple endosperm cereals.

 ?? PIC: PICTARAM.COM ??
PIC: PICTARAM.COM

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