https://www.cas.cn/cm/202512/t20251225_5093779.shtml
A single seed can change the world, and a technology can create a miracle. Recently, a series of research achievements from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Class A Strategic Priority Research Program, “Precision Design and Creation of Seeds,” were released in Beijing. After six years of dedicated research, researchers have achieved a series of breakthroughs in creating a “Chinese core” for the revitalization of the seed industry.
Academician Li Jiayang’s team used gene editing technology to enable the “depth domestication” of wild rice, shortening a 10,000-year process to a few years. They overcame difficulties such as the genetic transformation of wild rice and successfully created a new type of tetraploid rice material, providing a forward-looking strategic technological reserve for global food security. The following is a transcript of the sharing by Gao Caixia, a researcher at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Crop domestication is a milestone event in human civilization, but the cycle of crop domestication is extremely long, sometimes requiring tens of thousands of years. Currently, only about 250 species have been fully domesticated. A vast number of excellent wild plants remain unutilized by humans, and effective technological means to develop these wild resources are still lacking.
Taking rice as an example, besides diploid cultivated rice, there are 24 wild rice species, possessing rich genetic diversity. Our (Seed Project) is particularly focused on allotetraploid wild rice originating in South America, which boasts advantages such as high biomass and strong stress resistance. However, it also exhibits typical incompatibility with distant hybridization, making it unsuitable for direct agricultural production. This work proposes for the first time the use of modern biotechnology, such as gene editing, to de novo domesticate superior allotetraploid wild rice, thereby creating entirely new crops. This strategy has the potential to shorten the domestication process from tens of thousands of years to just a few years.
To achieve this goal, China’s rice seed project) systematically conducted wild rice germplasm resource screening, overcoming the technical challenges of genetic transformation and gene editing in allotetraploid wild rice. Researchers completed the assembly of the tetraploid rice genome and the editing of domestication genes, conquering the technical obstacles to the de novo domestication of wild rice. Building upon this foundation, they utilized gene-editing technology to rapidly improve key agronomic traits, creating tetraploid rice materials with reduced shattering, shorter awns, reduced plant height, larger grains, thicker stems, and varying degrees of shortened growth periods. This achievement demonstrates for the first time the feasibility of breeding new crops through de novo domestication strategies.