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Link to paper (Nature Comms): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35679-3

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Norman Borlaug would be happy & proud to know of another innovation to feed the planet.

Well. His contribution is somewhat overhyped, at least in South Asian context. Had it not been groundwater, pumps, and electricity, those high yield hybrids would not have been successful. So, it wasnt as much green revolution as it was water pump revolution, and to some extent fertilizer revolution.

I suspect the same with most of such high yield seed varieties. They are often fertilizer and water intensive in reality, if not in labs, which defeats the purpose of having such seeds if you have unpredictable water supply.

Those are impactful aspects, but separate from hybridization. A variety with poor genetic potential grown in optimal conditions will still yield poorly.

This is actually so much bigger a deal than people realize. When you don’t clean the slate on GMOs season to season you have much longer runways to get the exact phenotype you want. Rice in 5 years could be nearly unrecognizable comparatively.

Love this

It also means the crop will be more susceptible to diseases, like bananas and fungus.

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No it doesn't. This method could be used on new varieties all the time, as we have to do now anyway to stay ahead of pathogens.

This would only be the case if a single clone were to dominate rice production, but this is extremely unlikely for a seed crop. This paper is not really about making rice a purely clonal crop like bananas, it's about dramatically reducing the cost of obtaining high quality hybrid seed in large quantities.

Oh My God, when will people realize relying on a crop that's all 100% genetically identical is a bad idea?

There is historical precedent for this.

If something goes wrong with your crop, if your crop is all clones, you lose all of it. And then when that happens, many, many, people starve to death.

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It's still a method that reduces diversity.

Like the frog in boiling water, we have already lost 75% of crop genetic diversity.

This doesn't mean all the rice in the world would be one clone. It would be easier and cheaper to produce multiple high-yield/disease resistant hybrids and make them accessible to farmers. They would need different varieties for different regions and markets, anyway.

There is hysterical precedent for people making this claim, most of whom have never seen a farmer seed catalog.

It is if you’re keeping them from season to season without breeding new hybrids, as specifically stated in the title of the thread.

The title of the post is explicitly calling that exact thing out as the benefit.

Not only that, but there isn’t only one banana option in existence, there’s just one that all the commercial growers use.

Unless there’s something specifically about rice that would prevent everyone from ending up using the same cloned strain, there’s no reason to believe this would turn out any different.

That will work for a while. But nobody said in the title or anywhere else that it's the end of the line.

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Rice uptakes a lot of arsenic.

It will only feed the planet if they make it available without patents or other intellectual property restrictions. Otherwise it will be just another variety poor people can’t afford.

If it's colonial it will diversify normally.

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