"We are also evaluating the DRO1 performance under rain-fed lowland with the International Rice Research Institute," he said. "If we can get positive results in farmer's fields, we hope to release the variety for Asian countries. We are also going to introduce the DRO1 into leading varieties in Latin America with CIAT," the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, he said.
Without genetic technology, it would have been extraordinarily hard to have pinpointed, and then inserted, the right gene, said Uga.
"Development of GM rice plants is... one of (the) useful strategies to improve drought resistance," he said.
In January 2012, scientists in Britain and Japan said they had developed a fast-track technique, called MutMat, that identifies useful genetic variants, or mutations, in rice plants. They used it to derive a strain from Japan's Hitomebore wild rice that is resistant to salinity -- a boon for farmers whose fields have high salt content through irrigation.
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