Indonesia Develops a Biotech Drought Tolerant Rice

Rice (Oryza sativa), one of the most important food crops, is drastically affected by drought, especially at the reproductive stage, thus, immensely affecting yield.  Dissecting the important genes and the genomic regions influencing drought tolerance and yield will aid the breeders in understanding the genetic mechanisms underlying the plants' response to drought. This will then be the basis of the breeding strategies for the  development of high yielding and drought tolerant varieties. The Research Centre of Biotechnology, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) has successfully developed a genetically engineered rainfed lowland rice cultivar with drought tolerance.  ”We have created the cultivar by overexpression of the genes encoding the transcription factors OsHOX” , said Prof. Dr. Umar A. Jenie, Head of LIPI. Furthermore, the cultivar is now being tested and is already in the early stage of a confined trial in a green house facility. This will be followed by environment and food safety testings as well as a multilocation field testing.

LIPI has also developed a yellow stem borer {S. incertulas (Walk)} -resistant rice variety.  According to Prof. Jenie, the preliminary field testing result showed that the transgenic crops are not adversely affecting the environment ecology since there is no geneflow to another crop as well as to other insects or soil microbes. He also emphasized that all  transgenic rice developed in Indonesia will be tested for its environmental and food safety.

For more information visit http://www.biotek.lipi.go.id/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=409 or http://www.biotek.lipi.go.id/ . Information on biotechnology research in Indonesia may be otained by emailing  dewisuryani@biotrop.org.