Moscow - Saba:
Geneticists from the Federal Research Center for Biotechnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences have proposed a new method for creating more productive and disease-resistant varieties of agricultural crops, particularly rice.
Experts from the Russian Science Foundation told Sputnik that "the genetic code of plants is replete with repetitive segments of DNA, which can be found singly or scattered throughout the genome. These scattered genes (so-called 'jumping genes') influence the function of other genes and play an important role in plant development and resistance to diseases and adverse environmental conditions. Incorporating genes from other organisms into plants is a promising approach for creating new crop varieties."
The experts added: "During their life cycle, 'jumping genes' change significantly (mutate), and existing computer programs cease to detect them, preventing subsequent editing."
To solve this problem, scientists from the Federal Research Center "Fundamentals of Biotechnology" of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow) developed an approach that uses mathematical "tables" that are progressively improved by comparing real DNA segments.
The authors confirmed that, unlike traditional methods, their method is capable of detecting even highly variable (mutated) repeats. After analyzing the rice genome using a new algorithm, the researchers were able to identify 992,739 repeats belonging to 79 different families. This is 56 percent more than the number of repeats identified by the EDTA algorithm, which is widely used by biologists.
Moreover, the repeats constituted 66 percent of the entire rice genome, which also exceeds previous estimates.
The project leader, Yevgeny Korotkov, stated, "Rice is the main food product for more than a billion people, and therefore, developing new, high-yielding varieties of this plant is a critical nutritional challenge."
According to Korotkov, in order to solve the problem of developing new rice varieties, it is necessary to understand the structure of the rice genome and identify all the mobile genetic elements within it.
The research team was able to discover a large number of previously unknown sequences, which will help find successful locations for integrating genes from other organisms into the rice genome and creating new varieties.
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