Virtual rice

With the onset of spring, rice farmers across the Northern Hemisphere set out to plant a new crop in their paddy fields. At the same time, Japanese researchers have been sowing the seeds for an in silico rice plant that is expected to fertilise research on rice as well as the whole field of plant genomics for years to come. Building on the two draft sequences of the rice genome, published recently in Science , the Japanese government has provided considerable funding for the Rice Simulator Project to create data resources and simulation software aimed at driving plant research forward.‘This alone won't make for the second green revolution,’ said Kenichi Higo, overall project leader and director of the molecular genetics department at the Japanese National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences (NIAS), a semi‐governmental research institute. Nevertheless, access to a comprehensive bank of data and modelling software could allow breeders to develop varieties—whether genetically engineered or traditionally crossbred—that better match local climates. ‘It's clear that the world will need wheat, corn, rice, or beans that can grow anywhere, in each locality,’ he said about the rationale for this undertaking.The Japanese effort, in combination with the sequencing of the rice genome, is expected to have major economic and social implications. The production of rice is said to be the world's greatest economic activity. And while it feeds billions, serving as a staple for an estimated 50% of the world's population, its scientific importance is wholly disproportionate to its size. In fact, the rice genome is significant precisely because, at 430 million bases, it is the smallest of all the grains. Expectations are high that results from research on the rice genome will transfer quickly to the study of corn, wheat and other crops.The groundwork for this latest Japanese project was …