Crop plants could now reproduce clonally through seeds

Grown throughout the world, F1 hybrid crop varieties have highly desirable traits. However, they remain expensive to produce. This situation may be about to change. By modifying the expression of certain genes, INRA researchers have created hybrid rice plants whose seeds give rise to offspring that are identical to the mother plant. Their work is the fruit of collaborations with scientists at University of California Davis and the China National Rice Research Institute. This breakthrough research has been published in Nature and Nature Biotechnology . Methods for breeding better crops focus on two key tasks: 1) producing high performing hybrids by crossing different plant lineages and 2) attempting to preserve and perpetuate the resulting genetic combinations such that the resulting seeds carry the target traits.