IRRI Pioneer Interviews--Yellow endosperm as a trait in rice: prelude to Golden Rice

See the full interview at http://archive.irri.org/publications/today/Toenniessen.asp

In an IRRI Pioneer Interview, Gary Toenniessen, a managing director of The Rockefeller Foundation and long-time IRRI collaborator, discusses how yellow endosperm (i.e., Golden Rice), got on the list of desirable traits for rice.

So, these breeders were sitting around kind of joking and laughing about how these biotechnologists were going to stick any gene into rice. Now, I was at this conference, in part, to learn as much as I could and to get ideas as to what the Foundation might invest in. So, I was sitting there too and I asked, Well what is your favorite gene then? These biotechnologists say they can stick any gene into rice and make it do what they want it to do. If you guys as breeders could do that what would be your favorite gene? Neil Rutger, who was a breeder at UC Davis at that time, took the lead and he asked each one in the group, Yes, whats your favorite gene?

We went around and most of them were not surprising: Blast resistance, said one; Drought tolerance, said another. Finally, we got around to Pete Jennings. First, just a little bit of background on Pete Jennings. He was a Rockefeller Foundation employee seconded initially to IRRI and then to CIAT but was really a Rockefeller Foundation employee for 30 some years, I think. He had been the first breeder at IRRI and made the initial cross that lead to IR8. He then left IRRI after several years and went to CIAT in Colombia to develop most of rice varieties that are grown in Latin America today—or at least the breeding lines that led to those varieties.

So, Pete knew what he was talking about and, while I was listening very intently to what he was going to say, when he said yellow endosperm, it didnt make any sense to me because I didnt know anything about why yellow endosperm would be an attractive or desirable trait. I asked, why? And I think some of the other breeders there responded in the same way. Yellow endosperm? Pete went on to explain that he recognized that Vitamin A deficiency was a serious problem throughout Asia and particularly in rice-consuming populations because there is no pro-Vitamin A or beta carotene in rice. Children, when they are being weaned, are fed a gruel, which is made up almost totally of rice and therefore they often lack Vitamin A, thus suffering the direct consequences of [possible blindness] and susceptibility to diseases.

That made a lot of sense to me. When I went back to New York, my job was to begin thinking about how we might put together research progra ms to address each of these traits. Bob Herdt, when he put his priorities together, found yellow endosperm very difficult to put into his system because there was no yield forgone. His method required that, so he tried to develop a way of pricing what yellow endosperm might allow in the sense of not having to provide supplementation and fortification programs. So, he was able to build that into his priorities and it did become one of our priority traits.

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Science & Technology

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