Crops Engineered to Destroy Own Pollen

In an effort to keep certain crops pure, UCLA researchers have genetically engineered plants so that they destroy their own pollen--the male sex cells. The advance should enable scientists to tailor a variety of important crops that are easier and cheaper to grow because they cannot pollinate on their own, as well as aid in the development of hybrid crops never before possible, experts said.

Farmers grow many crops that have been specially bred to have some desirable quality, such as resistance to disease or production of large quantities of seeds. But for the strains to be kept pure, farmers must go through the costly, time-consuming task of removing pollen from hybrid crops in the field by hand to prevent them from randomly cross-breeding with other strains.

This physical depollination is virtually impossible, however, for small plants such as rice. The new development will make it unnecessary to perform manual depollination.

Biologist Robert Goldberg and his colleagues at UCLA and Plant Genetic Systems NV of Ghent, Belgium, reported last week in the journal Nature that they had introduced into tobacco and commercially important oilseed rape plants the gene for an enzyme that destroyed the pollen without affecting the plants’ other properties.