Chinese scientists develop disease and insect resistant rice

Chinese scientists have developed a new rice variety with genome-wide breeding chip technology which is likely to be the first disease and insect resistant high-yield rice in China.

The new rice variety will be cultivated in northeast Helongjiang Province in April, National Seed Group announced here today.

"The new variety is expected to be the first disease and insect resistant and high-yield rice in the country," the company said at the signing ceremony with Rongzhong Capital Investment Group in Wuhan city, central China's Hubei Province.

"The use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers have caused environmental and food safety problems," Zhang Qifa of Chinese Academy of Sciences said.

"But the genome-wide chip helps develop a new variety to cope with the problem," he was quoted as saying by state-run Xinhua news agency.

In May 2012, scientists from China National Seed Group, Peking University and Huazhong Agricultural University selected more than 40,000 useful gene markers in countless gene data and developed the first genome-wide breeding chip in the world.

"It helped to improve the diseases and insects resistance of the current rice variety," said Zhou Fasong, leading scientist at China National Seed Group.

"We have been identifying the genes in the past five years, and recently finally developed the new breed."

(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)