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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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New rice eliminates methane output

Richland research firm wins best tech of the year award

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Rice is the staple food source for more than half the world’s population, but it’s hard on the planet.

With their warm, water-logged soils, rice paddies contribute up to 17 percent of the global emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Research led by Christer Jansson at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland has come up with a new kind of rice that not only nearly eliminates the production of greenhouse gas, but also increases the yield of rice plants to produce more food.

The research, which included work by scientists in three nations, has been named the grand prize winner for engineering in Popular Science magazine’s annual Best Tech of the Year edition.

“As the world’s population grows, so will rice production,” Jansson said, when his study was published this summer in the weekly science journal Nature. “And as the Earth warms, so will rice paddies, resulting in even more methane emissions. It’s an issue that must be addressed.”

Jansson has worked on a solution for more than a decade with Chaunxin Sun of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, developing a new type of rice, SUSIBA 2 rice. They identified a gene in barley that directs how a plant uses carbon and introduced it into common rice.

The new rice produces a plant that can better feed its grains, stems and leaves by sending less of the carbon it pulls from the atmosphere into its root system. The methane-producing microbes in the soil no longer have carbon to convert into methane.

Not only can the plant produce more grains, they are plumper and starchier.

“This is a win-win finding,” said Jansson, the director of plant sciences at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a Department of Energy facility at PNNL’s Richland campus.

The 100 million tons of methane produced annually from rice paddies is a smaller percentage of overall greenhouse gases than is produced by its better-known counterpart, carbon dioxide.

But methane is about 20 times more efficient at trapping heat in the atmosphere, making the team’s contribution especially important for climate issues, according to PNNL.

The rice has performed well in field tests in China, where some of the research was done, according to Popular Science.

The awards are described in the December issue of the magazine.

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