Study Seeks Molecular Differences between Cultivated and Weedy Rice

Red rice may conjure up images of an exotic dish, but it's a weed, the biggest nuisance to American rice growers. Complicating matters is the fact that red rice and cultivated rice belong to the same species, so a selective herbicide is difficult to be developed. Another problem with red rice is that some red rice strains look remarkably like cultivated rice and behave like cultivated rice. The plants are as tall as cultivated rice and flower at the same time. These "crop mimics" are difficult to spot.

Kenneth M. Olsen, Washington University assistant professor of biology, and colleagues from the University of Massachusetts and the United States Department of Agriculture National Rice Research Center have been bestowed with a US$1.12 million funding by the US National Science Foundation to perform genetic studies on red rice to find molecular differences from cultivated rice, which someday could provide the basis for a plan to eradicate the weed.

"By looking at candidate genes and those genes surrounding them we can test the hypotheses of the origins of traits and see if the traits have been introduced by hybridization of weedy and wild species, or, conversely, we can look at the molecular level to see if the de-domestication phenomenon is going on", said Olsen.

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