International Team of Researchers Use CRISPR to Create Disease Resistant Rice

An international research team, including scientists from the University of California Davis and the University of Adelaide, has created disease-resistant rice using the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas. The team edited a newly-discovered rice gene called RBL1, with the resulting rice variety showing both high yields and resistance to the fungus that causes rice blast.

Guotian Li, a co-lead author of the study, discovered a mutant known as a lesion mimic mutant while working as a postdoctoral scholar in Pamela Ronald's lab at UC Davis. Ronald, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center, is a co-lead author of the study.

In the collaborative work that was led by researchers at Huazhong Agricultural University, China, and UC Davis, researchers identified a rice variety that already had strong resistance to fungal and bacterial diseases but produced poor grain yields. They showed that this plant was mutated in the gene RBL1. Using gene editing, the team generated 57 gene variants from this rice that they tested against several strains of rice blast and bacterial blight. One variant of RBL1 was found to have broad-spectrum disease resistance. Unlike other varieties, this variant was still able to produce large yields—five times more than the control rice—in small-scale field trials.

For more details, read the news articles in UC Davis News and the University of Adelaide Newsroom.