New gene defines the next "green revolution"

Original title: The new gene defines the next "green revolution
"China's three major food crops fertilizer utilization rate is only 39.2%, the vast majority of released into the land and air, resulting in environmental pollution." How to 'lose weight and increase efficiency' is a major problem that needs to be solved urgently in the sustainable development of agriculture. Fu Dongdong, a researcher at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the China Science Daily.
February 7, Science published a cover article on Fu's team's research on the new mechanisms by which erythromycin and nitrogen work together to regulate plant growth and development. The results will provide a new breeding strategy for the cultivation of new varieties of green high-yielding and efficient crops with "less input and more output", which heralds the coming of a new "green revolution".
Breaking through the bottleneck of the "green revolution"
Since the 1960s, the "green revolution", marked by the cultivation of new varieties of semi-dwarf wheat and rice, has brought about a substantial increase in global grain production and solved the food crisis caused by rapid population growth worldwide.
more than 40 years, the development of plant molecular biology and genomics has revealed the essence of the "green revolution" - the biological effects of the plant hormone erythromycin.
erythromycin synthesis path is blocked, and the high yield target of plant semi-dwarfing and anti-falling is achieved.
, a professor, told China Science Daily: "However, these varieties are insensitive to nitrogen fertilizer and need to be used more to achieve high yields." The
large amount of nitrogen fertilizer input not only increases the cost of planting, but also leads to increasingly serious environmental pollution.
how to break through the bottleneck of the "green revolution" has become a tight string in Fu's heart.
New gene-inspired breeding new way
Fu introduced, the team to the rice branch response to nitrogen as the starting point, found erythromycin and nitrogen co-regulation of rice growth and development of the key gene NGR5, and expounded the NGR5 through the observational genetic regulation of rice branch number and other agrochemical nitrogen response molecular mechanism.
Further research has found that in the current main plant varieties, improving the expression of NGR5 can not only improve the efficiency of nitrogen fertilizer utilization, but also maintain excellent semi-dwarfing and high yield characteristics, so that rice can obtain higher yield under the conditions of nitrogen reduction and fertilizer, and lay the foundation for the cultivation of high-yielding and efficient "green revolution" new varieties.
Fu Tongdong, the breakthrough point of the research results is that NGR5 is not only a positive regulatory factor of plant response to nitrogen, but also a new important protein in the erythromycin signaling pathway. Erythromycin promotes the degradation of NGR5 protein, resulting in a reduction of methylation modification throughout the genome, which in turn promotes the expression of target genes and enables erythromycin to regulate plant growth and development.
addition, the discovery of new genes can bring together multiple excellent allegment genes, providing a new breeding strategy that can significantly reduce nitrogen fertilizer inputs and increase yields. "In the future, new varieties can be developed to compensate for the dwarfing breeding defects of 60 years ago and to achieve the goal of high-yield, high-efficiency and collaborative improvement of breeding." Fu said.
"win-win" situation of increasing and reducing
."The cultivation of new varieties of crops with high yields and efficient use of collaboratively improved crops through molecularly designed breeding methods is essential for food security and sustainable agricultural development." Fu Is working with the Hefei Institute of Materials of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Oxford University and other units to aggregate a number of excellent allegable genes, to cultivate "less input, more output" of green high-yielding and efficient new varieties.
However, the vast majority of research on plant nitrogen metabolism and signaling molecular mechanisms and regulatory networks is still concentrated in model plant athropomorphous, and among the many cloned and identified genes, the genetic resources with breeding application value in crop yield and nitrogen fertilizer utilization efficiency are still very limited. Therefore, there is still a long way to go to achieve the continuous increase of crop yield while reducing the use of nitrogen fertilizer.
Fu, the team's future research direction has three aspects. First, the comprehensive use of various histological means, combined with computational biology, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, the systematic analysis of nitrogen metabolism, carbon metabolism and plant growth and development of collaborative regulatory mechanisms.
Second, make full use of wild resources, farm species, main plant varieties and other species materials, through GVAS analysis, QTL positioning and map cloning and other methods, systematic analysis of the control of nitrogen fertilizer efficient use of the key genes and their regulatory network, mining excellent allegant genes or the use of gene editing technology to create new alletic variations, to obtain a collaborative increase in crop yield and efficient use of nitrogen fertilizer molecular modules.
3. Third, the expression pattern transformation of key genes is carried out by using space-time-specific promoter, and the current main planting varieties are imported through multi-gene polymerization technology, so as to cultivate new varieties of green high-yielding and high-efficiency crops with "less input and more output".
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