SCIENCE CITY OF MUÑOZ – The day isn’t far for the release of a variety whose grains are gold-colored and laden with a promise of helping curb certain vitamin deficiency that causes blindness.
It is generally referred to as “golden rice”.
The peculiar color in both the unhusked and milled form of the grains is due to the presence of beta-carotene. It is the color of the grains that made it to be called “golden rice”.
The Philippine-bred variety, whose genes came from the improved variety of the original golden rice, was developed by a team of the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) here.
Confined field test for this variety was already successfully done and is now being readied for multi-location field-testing in the country.
According to Dr. Antonio Alfonso, leader of the PhilRice Golden Rice Project, the capability of this plant type to produce beta-carotene is significant as it offers big advantages in helping address the problem of vitamin A deficiency in many people.
He said its beta-carotene content in the grain is richer compared with other plant sources.
He hastened to add that the beta carotene, as a precursor, becomes vitamin A only when it is processed by the body. A cup of cooked rice, he added, could supply 50 percent of the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of Vitamin A for adult.
He also said the conversion of beta-carotene to vitamin A happens only when the body needs it, hence, there will be no vitamin A complications if this carotenoid is taken in large amounts.
Alfonso said his team, in the first stage of the research and development works, transferred genes from an improved golden rice donor to PSB Rc 82 (Peñaranda), a local rice variety widely used by the farmers for planting.
Subsequent works in the laboratory and in screen house, he added, included introgression or DNA marker-aided backcrossing and selection, trial planting in controlled environment, and initial field evaluation.
BUILDING BLOCKS
Alfonso said the “golden rice” strain, from which they obtained the transferred genes, was developed in Switzerland from 1991 to 2002.
It was a breakthrough as the developed rice grain contained building blocks for the production of beta-carotene
Ordinary rice variety, he said, does not contain this capability.
He added that the invention of this plant-type was meant to help solve the problem of Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) which causes blindness and even death especially among children.
Rice, Alfonso further said, was selected for addressing the problem of VAD for easy reach by the poor rice eaters at less cost than buying other food or food supplements as a source of this particular vitamin.
Quoting sources, he said that VAD causes up to 670,000 deaths among children globally. It also causes blindness to 350,000 people and that 90 million children in Southeast Asia were found in VAD condition.
In the Philippines, he added, 15.2 percent of children between six months to five years are Vitamin A-deficient. For pregnant women and lactating mothers, the deficiencies are at 9.5 percent and 6.4 percent, respectively, he said.
PhilRice formed Alfonso’s team in 2004 believing that the genetic engineering of rice plants that will incorporate biosynthetic genes from golden rice would help address the problem about VAD. It hoped that the outcome of the efforts will result in cultivars adapted in Philippine agricultural conditions.
The agency’s biofortification initiative drew encourage from the Food Fortification Act. This law, among others, calls for the institution of a food fortification program in the country designed to address problems of malnutrition.
Alfonso, a Young Scientist awardee of the Department of Science and Technology and TOYM awardee of the Philippine Jaycees, said the inventor of golden rice, Prof. Ingo Potrykus of the Institute for Plant Sciences of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and Prof. Peter Beyer of the Center for Biosciences of the University of Freiburg in Germany, together with their funding agencies and the companies which are holders of the intellectual property licenses for the plant-type, donated their inventions to interested parties for further development.
IRRI, which received the golden rice grains, made available the materials to the Philippines and to other public breeding institutions in other countries.
Alfonso said their research works are financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockerfeller Foundation, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. He added that IRRI and the Helen Keller International are the partners of PhilRice in this project.
“Results of our confined field test for the plant-type already showed promising results. Among others, the color of the grains produced are like the meat of squash, meaning there’s beta-carotene in them,” he said.
Alfonso said his group has now more than enough grains for the multi-location field-testing of this plant type and for compositional analysis.
BIOSAFETY
Alfonso assured that his team made sure that their works are closely monitored by the bio-safety committee of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).
“We are definitely working closely with the national regulatory agencies to ensure safety in this particular biotechnology project,” he said. “The Bureau of Plant Industry will do the field evaluation and eventual approval of this rice variety,” he added.
He said that the set of scientific and technical reviews, including safety information, of the output will be submitted to the appropriate government regulators in due time.
“We cannot point to a particular date yet when it would be available for commercial planting. We are working… working and hoping that it can be released for the farmers’ planting use due time,” Alfonso said.
In a statement, IRRI said it has been participating in research and collation of data in the breeding of golden rice into local varieties for human health and the environment.
“If at the end of this project, Golden Rice is proven to be safe, with improved Vitamin A status, and reaching the poor and those most in need, we will introduce it to other countries to fight Vitamin A deficiency,” the IRRI statement further said.
Asked what name this Philippine-bred golden rice would be known, Alfonso said: “That will come later”.
