Golden Rice Humanitarian Board
Zurich
Switzerland
contact@goldenrice.org
Golden Rice is rice that has been genetically engineered to produce and accumulate β-carotene in the endosperm (the edible part of the grain). This gives the grains a golden color, as opposed to regular white rice, which is practically devoid of carotenoids. When the rice is consumed, the β-carotene is either stored in the fatty tissues of the body or converted into vitamin A. People living on a poor diet are at risk of becoming vitamin A deficient, which can lead to life-threatening illnesses.
Rice produces β-carotene in the leaves but not in the grain, where the biosynthetic pathway is turned off during plant development. In Golden Rice, two genes have been inserted into the rice genome through genetic engineering, to restart the carotenoid biosynthetic pathway leading to the production and accumulation of β-carotene in the grains. Both genes are naturally involved in carotene biosynthesis. The difference here is that the reconstructed pathway is not subject to down regulation, as usually happens in the grain.
The intensity of the golden color is a visual indicator of the concentration of β-carotene in the endosperm. The goal is to make sure that people living in rice-based societies get a full complement of provitamin A from their traditional diets. This would apply to countries such as India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Golden Rice could still be a valuable complement to children's diets in many countries by contributing to the reduction of clinical and sub-clinical vitamin A deficiency-related diseases.
Golden Rice was invented by Ingo Potrykus, Professor emeritus of the Institute for Plant Sciences of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Professor Peter Beyer, of the Centre for Applied Biosciences, University of Freiburg, Germany. The search for Golden Rice began as a Rockefeller Foundation initiative in 1982. After years of research by various research groups, a meeting of experts was convened in New York in 1992. There, Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer met for the first time, and subsequently decided to embark on the project that would lead to the development of Golden Rice in 1999. Their great contribution consisted of showing that a very complex biosynthetic pathway could be tweaked to enhance the health-promoting virtues of a crop. The breakthrough insight was that most of the pathway was already present in the rice grain and it only needed two genes to reset the entire pathway.
Publicly available: yes
Countries where available: Worldwide
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