Andy Coghlan
A SIMPLE sugar could come to the rescue of poor farmers whose soils are too salty, drought-ridden or cold to support crops.
The sugar, called trehalose, already enables a desert stalwart, the so-called “resurrection plant”, to spring miraculously back to life when rain arrives. Now, with the help of a pair of genes borrowed from a bacterium, biotechnologists have found a way of altering rice so that it makes its own trehalose.
Ironically, the breakthrough coincides with a warning from Tewolde Gebre Egziabher, the head of Ethiopia’s environmental protection agency, that genetically modified crops could harm local food…
