Monsanto Offers Up Draft of Genetic Code of Rice Plant

Monsanto Co. said Tuesday that it has completed “a working draft” of the genetic code of the rice plant--paving the way for improved nutrition, crop yields and drought tolerance, traits needed to feed a growing world population.

It is the first plant genome to reach this advanced stage of completion, and scientists say it is especially significant because almost half of the world’s people, most of them in Asia, depend on rice as the main staple in their diet.

The information in the draft, which the agricultural products company intends to make freely available to academic researchers, will also allow an international, government-funded effort to complete a finely detailed final draft of the rice genome as early as 2003.

But the working draft itself will be immediately useful to plant research, not just for rice but for a wide range of genetically related food crops, including corn and wheat, scientists say.

Monsanto says that the new knowledge contained in the draft genome will lead in the years ahead to rice varieties that can be grown where the crop cannot be grown today, using fewer natural resources, including land and water. It will help researchers develop new kinds of rice--through both genetic engineering and conventional breeding--that provide more protein and vitamins.

Scientists have long talked about breeding or engineering crops that can make their own fertilizer, resist common plant diseases and grow on soil contaminated by salt from excessive irrigation.

The rich but incomplete readout of the plant’s genetic instructions contains most of the useful information in the 12 chromosome pairs that make up the rice genome, the researchers say.

“By analogy, think of an encyclopedia of how to construct a rice plant made up of 100 volumes, each with 1,000 pages and with 1,000 words to a page,” said Leroy Hood, who headed a team at the University of Washington that decoded the genome with a grant from Monsanto. “In the working draft, you’ll see occasional misspelled words, some missing words and occasionally a missing paragraph. But in the overall context of the book, you’ll be able to read most of it.”

The announcement of the draft comes at a time when Monsanto, which is now part of life-sciences giant Pharmacia Corp., has been under heavy criticism because of its success in selling farmers its genetically altered seeds.

Consumers in Europe and Japan and protesters in the U.S. have demanded labeling of genetically modified foods and have threatened to boycott unlabeled U.S. produce.

On Tuesday, Monsanto officials, as well as other scientists, stressed that the draft of the rice genome would prove most useful to researchers who are working on conventionally bred hybrids and eventually to those trying to introduce desirable characteristics from one species of plant into another, creating genetically engineered crops.

“With all this emphasis on genetic engineering, we lose sight of the fact that conventional plant breeding is still the most important aspect of plant improvement,” said Ben Burr, a plant geneticist at Brookhaven National Laboratories and the coordinator of the international sequencing project.

However, standard plant breeding is time consuming, requiring several generations of crops and years of effort to find new varieties with improved characteristics.

Knowing the genetic makeup of a plant allows researchers to more easily pick out those hybrids that have the desired characteristics--and without bringing all of the test plants to harvest, Burr said.

The rice genome, which is 400 million chemical letters long, is less than half the size of its human counterpart--and much smaller than the genetic instructions for wheat, corn and other crops.

Monsanto, which has been the world leader in genetically engineered crops, will make its draft genome immediately available to the international effort. And it will allow academic scientists to use the data freely, if they agree not to provide it to Monsanto’s competitors, company officials said Tuesday.

The academic scientists will be free to patent any useful discoveries made using the Monsanto draft--but if they do so, they must promise to allow the company to negotiate a nonexclusive licensing agreement for any patent granted.

Parent Pharmacia’s shares reacted Tuesday, rising $3.50 to close at $57.63 on the New York Stock Exchange.

The work represents a vindication of sorts for Hood and other scientists, who in a 1996 paper proposed a shortcut for deciphering the genetic code of any living thing, including that of humans.

Among the paper’s coauthors was J. Craig Venter, who now heads Celera Genomics, a company that is competing with a publicly funded effort to decode the larger and more complicated human genome.