Understanding how rice survives floods
For rice crops in Southeast Asia, where rice farmers face the challenges of floods during the rainy summer months and fall monsoon season, being able to thrive in flood conditions is critical.
For rice crops in Southeast Asia, where rice farmers face the challenges of floods during the rainy summer months and fall monsoon season, being able to thrive in flood conditions is critical. Amazingly, rice has the capability to adapt its height to adjust to rising water levels, which enables the plants to ride out floods.
Susan McCouch, a professor of plant breeding and genetics at Cornell University, and a research team from Japan and the United States have identified a gene in rice that is critical to its survival in flood conditions. “To keep its head above water, the rice can grow up to 20 feet and stay there,” says McCouch, adding that until now researchers did not know which gene signaled the plant to respond to the flood. “What’s interesting is that if the floods don’t reach that high, the plant can grow 7 feet tall or 1 foot extra. It won’t grow at all extra if the floods don’t come.”
Read more about all that McCouch has learned about rice in the 30 years she has devoted to studying it in an articletitled “Resilient Rice on the Rise” that appears under the Forward Thinkers banner as part of the IFTNEXT initiative. It’s just one of a series of articles written for ift.org/iftnext by veteran journalists profiling some of the visionary thinkers who are shaping the food industry and the science of food.