“Rice farming is an underrated driver of climate change, responsible for roughly one tenth of global methane emissions. The problem is not the rice plants themselves, but the methane-emitting microbes (methanogens) that thrive in their flooded paddies. A team of researchers in China has found a promising solution. First, they identified two compounds with a significant impact on these microbes; fumarate and ethanol. The former enhanced methanogen abundance, and the latter inhibited it. By breeding hybrid rice varieties low in fumarate and high in ethanol, they were able to reduce methane emissions by 70 percent in field trials while achieving high yields,” reports The Doomslayer.
The South China Morning Post adds:
Chinese and Swedish researchers have developed a high-yield rice variety that emits up to 70 per cent less methane than normal rice after uncovering how chemicals released by rice roots influence emissions. The scientists said their new low-methane hybrid rice offered a promising strategy to address a future rise in rice-related emissions because of global warming and an increasing global population.
“We discovered that fumarate and ethanol are two major rice-orchestrated secretions and play a key role in regulating methane emissions,” the team wrote in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Molecular Plant on Monday. In particular, the team found that rice that produced less fumarate and more ethanol helped reduce methane emissions. Breeding a new rice variety with these characteristics resulted in “70 per cent reductions in methane production”, they said.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with a significantly higher heat-trapping capacity than carbon dioxide, although it has a shorter atmospheric lifespan. Emissions originate from various sources, including agriculture and livestock farming, waste decomposition and the energy sector.
The cultivation of rice – a staple food for half the world’s population – alone is responsible for around 12 per cent of man-made global methane emissions, according to a press release by the journal’s publisher Cell Press. As the global population grows and demand for rice increases, total methane emissions are only expected to rise….The team, led by scientists from Hunan Agricultural University in Changsha and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, studied a genetically modified low-methane rice they had previously introduced to find the source of emissions. While the team already had a genetically modified low-methane rice variety, they used traditional breeding methods to create a new hybrid rice with low fumarate and high ethanol.
Genetic engineering will also help the world cope with climate change, by producing crops and livestock better suited to hotter, drier, or wetter conditions. The gene-editing tool CRISP will do that, reports MIT Technology Review:
Many more CRISPR-edited plants and animals are on the way, and a number of them were altered to promote traits that could help them survive or thrive in conditions fueled by climate change, beginning to fulfill one long-standing promise of genetic engineering. That includes the offspring of two cattle that Acceligen, a Minnesota-based precision breeding business, edited to have shorter coats better suited to hotter temperatures. In 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration determined that meat and other products from those cattle “pose low risk to people, animals, the food supply, and the environment” and can be marketed for sale to American consumers.
Other companies are harnessing CRISPR to develop corn with shorter, stronger stalks that could reduce the loss of crops to increasingly powerful storms; novel cover crops that can help sequester more carbon dioxide and produce biofuels; and animals that could resist zoonotic diseases that climate change may be helping to spread, including avian influenza….
IGI is working to develop rice that can withstand drier conditions, as well as crops that may suck up and store away more carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas driving climate change. Older genetic modification techniques, which involve moving genes from one organism into another, have already delivered agricultural blockbusters, including crops that are resistant to herbicides and corn, potatoes, and soybeans with enhanced protections against pests.
The gene-editing tool CRISPR is also helping treat severe auto-immune diseases. “One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells,” reports Nature.
Gene therapy has also ended the years of excruciating pain suffered by a boy with sickle-cell disease.
It also has restored vision in some people with inherited blindness.
An English toddler has had her hearing restored in a pioneering gene therapy trial: “Opal Sandy was born unable to hear anything due to auditory neuropathy, a condition that disrupts nerve impulses traveling from the inner ear to the brain and can be caused by a faulty gene. But after receiving an infusion containing a working copy of the gene during groundbreaking surgery that took just 16 minutes, the 18-month-old can hear almost perfectly and enjoys playing with toy drums.”
A new gene therapy blocks the painful hereditary condition angiodema.
A genetically-modified chicken lays eggs that people allergic to eggs can eat. Scientists have genetically engineered a cow that produces human insulin in its milk.
Genetic engineering recently produced pork that people who are allergic to pork can eat.
