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1. Rice plants usually love warmth. But when they start to flower, hot nights can result in meager harvests and chalky grain. So far, breeders have made slow progress in solving these challenges, which are becoming more urgent with climate change. Now, after searching for more than a decade, researchers in China have found a culpable gene, which they describe this week in Cell. They also show that a natural variant of the gene can preserve both yield and rice quality when temperatures rise. “This paper is a major breakthrough,” says Argelia Lorence, a plant biochemist at Arkansas State University who studies heat stress in rice. The impact could ultimately be even broader than rice, she notes: The gene is present in other cereals, such as wheat and corn, that suffer similar problems with heat. (Source: cell.com, science.org)
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