How rice can become more resilient

Just like all other organisms, rice plants are struggling with the impacts of climate change. More heat and less precipitation are putting the most commonly used varieties under pressure. Given the role they play in feeding billions of people, this bears an enormous risk. 

In an international collaborative project, researchers from the USA, the United Kingdom and Germany are seeking to make rice more resilient towards the threat of climate change. Germany’s Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg is also involved in the venture.

Expertise from four countries 

In addition to the University of Würzburg, the UK’s University of Sheffield, Penn State University in the USA as well as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines are taking part in the research. “IRRI is the leading institution when it comes to rice. They have the expertise as well as all the rice varieties and, of course, the acreage needed to implement the project,” explained Professor Arthur Korte, a bio-informatician at Julius Maximilians Universityät Würzburg (JMU) in a February 2025 press release.

As Korte further notes, 200 ancient land varieties of rice are being cultivated in the Philippines, on the one hand in regular conditions, and on the other under so-called rain shelters. “Even more heat builds up under these shelters, and the plants get less water. So we are creating a possible future scenario for the climate,” Korte comments. In Sheffield, the same experimental setup is being copied on a smaller scale in plant breeding chambers.

The project started on the 1st February 2025, and after just four to six weeks, the researchers intend to take the first samples in the Philippines and extract RNA. “Stress factors already have severe impacts on the plant’s future yield in the early stages of growth,” Korte explains.

The answer lies in the genes

In order to achieve stable yields despite changing climate conditions, the team seek to unravel the secrets the genes of the rice plants hold. Here, a special focus is on the stomata, or guard cells. These tiny pores on the undersides of all plant leaves are responsible for gas exchange, i.e. they take up carbon dioxide (CO2) and emit oxygen. Furthermore, during this process, the plants lose water through tiny openings in the form of water vapour.

Based on several previous years of research, the scientists assume that genes regulating these processes have a huge impact on the yields of plants. 

Here, the researchers are looking for alleles, natural relatives of these genes. For them, those rare examples are interesting “which see to it that individual proteins work more actively and better – which means maintaining higher resistance towards heat and drought”, Korte explains.

In the course of the research programme, the most common rice varieties are to adopt the desirable characteristics with these promising genetic varieties via cross-breeding programmes at IRRI.

“As with all useful plants, rice also includes a number of elite races. These have been bred for hundreds of years because they promise the highest yields. Often, however, it is precisely these varieties which are especially vulnerable to stress factors such as heat and drought,” says Korte, explaining the current situation in rice cultivation.

Given around 30,000 genes per rice plant and a wide range of variables, enormous amounts of variables quickly arise for the evaluation if which machine learning is to be used. This is to enable Korte to predict which gene expressions could ultimately lead to more yield in difficult conditions. “Here in Würzburg, with the Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology (CCTB) as well as the new mainframe Julia 2, we have the necessary infrastructure and computing power to put such models into practice,” he notes.

(University of Würzburg/wi)

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University of Würzburg