RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes,
rice
Research could yield increased food production, boost drought tolerance


Date:
July 22, 2021
Source:
University of Chicago
Summary:
A new RNA breakthrough is allowing plants to yield dramatically
more crops and increase drought tolerance, which could have an
impact on food scarcity and production as climate change threatens
ecosystems. In initial tests, adding a gene encoding for a protein
called FTO to both rice and potato plants increased their yield
by 50 percent in field tests -- and the plants grew significantly
larger, produced longer root systems and were better able to
tolerate drought stress.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Manipulating RNA can allow plants to yield dramatically more crops, as
well as increasing drought tolerance, announced a group of scientists
from the University of Chicago, Peking University and Guizhou University.


==========================================================================
In initial tests, adding a gene encoding for a protein called FTO to both
rice and potato plants increased their yield by 50% in field tests. The
plants grew significantly larger, produced longer root systems and were
better able to tolerate drought stress. Analysis also showed that the
plants had increased their rate of photosynthesis.

"The change really is dramatic," said University of Chicago Prof. Chuan
He, who together with Prof. Guifang Jia at Peking University, led the
research. "What's more, it worked with almost every type of plant we
tried it with so far, and it's a very simple modification to make."
The researchers are hopeful about the potential of this breakthrough, especially in the face of climate change and other pressures on crop
systems worldwide.

"This really provides the possibility of engineering plants to potentially improve the ecosystem as global warming proceeds," said He, who is the
John T.

Wilson Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry and
Molecular Biology. "We rely on plants for many, many things -- everything
from wood, food, and medicine, to flowers and oil -- and this potentially offers a way to increase the stock material we can get from most plants."
Rice nudged along For decades, scientists have been working to boost
crop production in the face of an increasingly unstable climate and a
growing global population. But such processes are usually complicated,
and often result only in incremental changes.



==========================================================================
The way this discovery came about was quite different.

Many of us remember RNA from high school biology, where we were taught
that the RNA molecule reads DNA, then makes proteins to carry out
tasks. But in 2011, He's lab opened an entire new field of research by discovering the keys to a different way that genes are expressed in
mammals. It turns out that RNA doesn't simply read the DNA blueprint
and carry it out blindly; the cell itself can also regulate which parts
of the blueprint get expressed. It does so by placing chemical markers
onto RNA to modulate which proteins are made and how many.

He and his colleagues immediately realized that this had major
implications for biology. Since then, his team and others around the
world have been trying to flesh out our understanding of the process
and what it affects in animals, plants and different human diseases;
for example, He is a co-founder of a biotech company now developing new anti-cancer medicines based on targeting RNA modification proteins.

He and Guifang Jia, a former UChicago postdoctoral researcher who is
now an associate professor at Peking University, began to wonder how it affected plant biology.

They focused on a protein called FTO, the first known protein that erases chemical marks on RNA, which Jia found as a postdoctoral researcher in
He's group at UChicago. The scientists knew it worked on RNA to affect
cell growth in humans and other animals, so they tried inserting the
gene for it into rice plants -- and then watched in amazement as the
plants took off.



==========================================================================
"I think right then was when all of us realized we were doing something special," He said.

The rice plants grew three times more rice under laboratory
conditions. When they tried it out in real field tests, the plants
grew 50% more mass and yielded 50% more rice. They grew longer roots, photosynthesized more efficiently, and could better withstand stress
from drought.

The scientists repeated the experiments with potato plants, which are
part of a completely different family. The results were the same.

"That suggested a degree of universality that was extremely exciting,"
He said.

It took the scientists longer to begin to understand how this was
happening.

Further experiments showed that FTO started working early in the plant's development, boosting the total amount of biomass it produced.

The scientists think that FTO controls a process known as m6A, which is a
key modification of RNA. In this scenario, FTO works by erasing m6A RNA
to muffle some of the signals that tell plants to slow down and reduce
growth. Imagine a road with lots of stoplights; if scientists cover up
the red lights and leave the green, more and more cars can move along
the road.

Overall, the modified plants produced significantly more RNA than
control plants.

Modifying the process The process described in this paper involves using
an animal FTO gene in a plant. But once scientists fully understand
this growth mechanism, He thinks there could be alternate ways to get
the same effect.

"It seems that plants already have this layer of regulation, and all
we did is tap into it," He said. "So the next step would be to discover
how to do it using the plant's existing genetics." He can imagine all
sorts of uses down the road -- and he's working with the university
and the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation to explore
the possibilities.

"Even beyond food, there are other consequences of climate change,"
said He.

"Perhaps we could engineer grasses in threatened areas that can
withstand drought. Perhaps we could teach a tree in the Midwest
to grow longer roots, so that it's less likely to be toppled
during strong storms. There are so many potential applications." ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Chicago. Original
written by Louise Lerner.

Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Qiong Yu, Shun Liu, Lu Yu, Yu Xiao, Shasha Zhang, Xueping Wang,
Yingying
Xu, Hong Yu, Yulong Li, Junbo Yang, Jun Tang, Hong-Chao Duan,
Lian-Huan Wei, Haiyan Zhang, Jiangbo Wei, Qian Tang, Chunling
Wang, Wutong Zhang, Ye Wang, Peizhe Song, Qiang Lu, Wei Zhang,
Shunqing Dong, Baoan Song, Chuan He, Guifang Jia. RNA demethylation
increases the yield and biomass of rice and potato plants in field
trials. Nature Biotechnology, 2021; DOI: 10.1038/s41587-021-00982-9 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210722112953.htm

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