Add fungi to improve rice

2010/09/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Biokimika
• Botanika

They have managed to form micorrizas and multiply by five the cultivation of rice plants

With the help of a small intervention by researchers, a group of researchers from Lausanne University, in Switzerland, has managed to have rice plants form micorrizes with the fungus Glomus intraradices. This symbiosis has shown that the growth of plants can be multiplied by five. The research has been published in the journal Current Biology.

Most plants (more than 80%) form in their roots a symbiosis called mycorrhiza with some terrestrial fungus. Thus, thanks to the fungi, the plant increases the absorption surface of water and minerals, collecting from the photosynthesis that the plant makes the fungi, the sugars it needs to grow and the vitamins.

In the rice plants, however, this symbiosis does not occur in itself. The researchers have promoted in the laboratory the symbiosis between the fungus Glomus intraradices and the rice plants.

The study analyzed the influence of three generations of fungi on plant growth. The first generation was formed by two spores of this fungus, whose descendants were the second and third with all spores of second generation. Well, the third generation fungi were the ones that generated the greatest growth of plants.

Scientists do not know for sure why third-generation fungi have produced the greatest growth, but they suspect that genetic diversity is behind it. In fact, gene exchange and segregation is increasingly abundant from generation to generation.