• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Vandals Purposely Destroy Italy’s Landmark First Gene-Edited Rice Crop Trial

June 26, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Under the shadow of night, criminals have put an end to an important field test in Italy. Scientists had planted a new experimental variety of rice that could be the answer to one of the most destructive diseases this crop faces – but the field was recently broken into and destroyed.

Advertisement

If you have ever had a good risotto, you most likely had it with arborio rice. This variety is ideal for that kind of dish based on the consistency of its grains when cooked. But the popular Italian variety is also susceptible to a deadly fungus, Pyricularia oryzae. Every year, the fungus destroys an amount of rice that could have fed 60 million people.

Advertisement

There is little to be done to stop the fungus. Fungicide treatments have been effective for a while, but it has pushed the fungus to adapt to them and left us to ingest the fungicide. A potential solution came in 2017 with the development of RIS8imo, a variety of rice resistant to the dangerous fungus that has many nicknames such as rice blast, rotten neck, and rice seedling blight.

The variety was created with the revolutionary genetic technique CRISPR-Cas9. The pioneers of it, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna were honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. In Italy, it is illegal to plant genetically modified organisms (GMOs) but this variety of rice is not a GMO.

There are three genes in the arborio rice that make it more susceptible to the fungus. Using the technique, the team made sure that those genes were inactivated variants. There’s nothing added to the rice – some species of rice naturally do that.

Rice leaves float in the water in a fenced off field.

The destroyed field. The name of the rice, RIS8imo, is a pun in Italian. It means Best Rice.

Image Credit: Vittoria Brambilla/Università Statale di Milano

 
The only difference is that this natural development was made in the lab when it comes to RIS8imo. For this reason, in Italy this falls under the TEA category: assisted evolution techniques in agriculture. A law was passed last year to put specific requirements into testing potential crops developed like this.

Advertisement

The rice field in this case was 28 square meters (302 square feet), planted on May 13. It was fenced and surrounded by another fenced field of 400 square meters (4,306 square feet) field to make sure that no rice could be spread beyond either through the weather or animals. 

Just over a month later, on June 21, the field was destroyed.

In a press release, the creators of the rice, Vittoria Brambilla and Fabio Fornara, Università Statale di Milano explain how the goal of their research is to create sustainable agriculture that is not dependent on chemical fungicides. The work on the site came after a broad agreement from the local community and other stakeholders.

“As publicly-funded scientists we express shock and sadness at having suffered this unjustified violence, the result of obscurantism and anti-scientific impulses,” Brambilla and Fornara stated. 

Advertisement

The team is expected to continue the work, given it could provide food for so many people, expressing hope that the Italian government would step up by protecting such experiments.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Slovak bishop who met Pope Francis last week tests positive for COVID
  2. Wells Fargo to pay $37.3 million to settle U.S. claims it fraudulently overcharged customers
  3. EU warns of security risks linked to migration from Afghanistan
  4. China Could Face A Catastrophic COVID Surge As It Lifts Restrictions – Here’s How It Might Play Out

Source Link: Vandals Purposely Destroy Italy’s Landmark First Gene-Edited Rice Crop Trial

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • New Nightmare Fuel Unlocked: Watch The First Known Capture Of A Shrew By A False Widow Spider
  • Peculiar Glow In The Milky Way Might Be Dark Matter Signature
  • “I Was Scared To Death”: Missouri’s Great Cobra Scare Of 1953 Was Eventually Solved After 35 Years
  • Two Spacecraft To Fly Through Comet 3I/ATLAS’s Ion Tail – Will They Be Able To Catch Something?
  • Pioneering Heavy Water Detection Suggests Earth’s Water Might Be Older Than The Sun
  • PhD Students’ Groundbreaking New Technique Rescues JWST’s Highest Resolution Data
  • Popcorn-Like Parasites And Weird Worms Among 14 New Species Discovered In The World’s Oceans
  • Poem From 1181 CE Cairo Appears To Reference A Rare Galactic Supernova
  • With “Iridescent Live Colors”, Newly Discovered Beautiful Dwarfgoby Lives Up To Its Name (Mostly)
  • “Anti-Tail” And Odd 594-Kilometer Feature Found On Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS By Keck Observatory
  • Why Do We Call It A “Hamburger” When It Doesn’t Contain Ham?
  • What Aristotle Got Wrong About The Octopus
  • The World’s Largest Island Is Shrinking And Shifting
  • Record-Breaking Marshmallow Planet – It’s A Cold, Peculiar World On A Very Slanted Orbit
  • Distinctive Rocks Might Be Remnants Of Earth Before The Collision That Made The Moon
  • Bright Northern Lights Across America Expected This Week As 3 Coronal Mass Ejections Fly Towards Earth
  • Brain Implant Enables Paralyzed Man To Feel And Use Objects Using Someone Else’s Hands
  • “This Is A Really Big Deal”: Brain Training Significantly Improves Key Neurochemical Levels In World First
  • “Wholly Unexpected”: First-Ever Fossil Paranthropus Hand Raises Questions About Earliest Tool Makers’ Identity
  • For Centuries, Nobody Knew Why Swiss Cheese Has Holes. Then, The Mystery Was Solved.
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version