Feeding the world: Uncovering a key regulator of flower head development in rice
Friday, April 1, 2016 - 16:20
in Mathematics & Economics
Rice is a staple food for more than 3.5 billion people worldwide. Meeting the demand for high-yielding rice is an urgent task for breeders. Superior, high-yielding hybrid plants are often produced by crossing two diverse parental lines. This task is quite complicated in rice, a self-pollinating plant. One approach to solving this problem originated in the 1970s, when Chinese scientists figured out how to produce male sterile (MS) rice lines.