USA - How Southern California researchers are developing the food of the future

By Alex Groves | Orange County Register

Some of the fruits, vegetables and grains of the future will be designed with challenges like a changing climate, growing population and fragile ecology in mind.

Southern California researchers are part of the effort to craft food crops that are more productive, easier to grow and less affected by reduced amounts of water and fertilizer – and they’re achieving these goals through a mixture of breeding, gene editing and everyday experimentation.

From finding ways to make rice that can withstand both wet and dry conditions to making lettuce that requires less water to grow, researchers in the region gave us some insight into what they are exploring.

Gene editing and selective breeding are among the methods used to deal with a changing climate and growing population. (Getty Images)

Resilient rice

When you think of plant breeding at UC Riverside, the university’s work with citrus to combat Huanglongbing, or citrus green disease, might be what comes to mind, but researchers there are also working to advance the way rice and even tomatoes are grown.

The Center for Plant Cell Biology is leading research into such topics as how to increase crop yield and resistance to pests, as well as creating sustainable biofuels. The center utilizes the skills of UCR’s graduate students through a graduate training program called Plants3D (the 3D stands for discover, design and deploy).

Professor Julia Bailey-Serres, director of the Center for Plant Cell Biology, and her group of researchers are examining ways to make rice that can better withstand a wide variety of conditions. She said rice does well in the wet conditions of paddies, but it’s possible that the paddies can dry in drought.

″What we’re working on is trying to figure out what we can do with rice that will allow it to do well, whether it’s in a paddy or it’s in dry soil,″ Bailey-Serres said.

Earlier research led by Bailey-Serres looked into the stress responses of rice and how these responses could be modified to potentially make the rice more resilient.

One possibility Bailey-Serre’s lab is looking into now is how to attract beneficial fungi and whether those fungi could help in drought conditions.

She said that might be possible due to the fungi’s hyphae, which are straw-like, stringy structures that could pull up water from the ground and get it closer to the rice’s root system.

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