Council for Biotechnology Information

Golden rice is rice fortified with betacarotene, which stimulates the production of vitamin A in the human body. Betacarotene gives carrots their orange, daffodils their yellow and golden rice the distinctive tint from which it gets its name.

Yearly, vitamin A deficiency causes blindness in 500,000 children and 1 million to 2 million deaths. It also weakens the body’s ability to ward off infection and minor illness.2 By introducing the building blocks of vitamin A into rice, a staple food around the world, researchers hope to attack the problem affordably and on a global scale.  "I'm very excited about golden rice," said Alfred Sommer, dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health atJohns Hopkins University, told the New Jersey Star-Ledger earlier this year. "It’s a really powerful new tool."

From the Lab to the Field. Building on the work of scientists Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, who created the first betacarotene-enhanced seeds, researchers at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines, hope to transform golden rice from a laboratory promise into an effective dinnerplate solution.

Once laboratory and greenhouse evaluations are complete, golden rice will be tested to see how it performs under real growing conditions. If the results are good, IRRI researchers hope to make the rice available to farmers by approximately 2006, says Swapan Datta, the institute’s chief plant biotechnologist.4 The IRRI researchers also will be monitoring any effects golden rice has on the environment.

One challenge for Datta and his team is to develop, through crossbreeding, varieties of the rice that farmers around the world can use -- varieties adapted to local tastes and growing conditions. That will enable golden rice to flourish in tropical areas such as Southeast Asia, for example, where 70 percent of children under the age of five are affected by vitamin A deficiency.

While a bowl of golden rice alone won’t give undernourished children the nutrient levels they need, IRRI researchers are also working to pack more punch into each grain. Traditional brown rice has a little betacarotene in its plant tissue. Golden rice in its current form has a lot more, located in the edible parts of the plant. But new varieties in development will have even higher levels of the eyesight-saving, disease-preventing nutrient.5

Nor is rice the only crop being fortified with betacarotene. Researchers are also working to develop an enriched mustard seed, whose oil is the second most commonly consumed oil in India. In addition, researchers are experimenting with iron, zinc and vitamin E-enhanced rice, with the goal of improving health in regions where rice accounts for up to 80 percent of caloric intake.

An Eye Toward Better Health. Research at the nonprofit IRRI is overseen by a Humanitarian Board whose members come from universities, corporations, the World Bank and the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, among other organizations. This is the first collaboration of its kind between the public sector and private companies involved in biotech research, the goal being to make golden rice available to poor people in developing countries as quickly and cheaply as possible.

That goal originated with Beyer and Potrykus, who were determined that their technology be used for humanitarian purposes. The son of a German army surgeon killed during World War II, Potrykus spent the final months of the war foraging for food for his mother and three siblings in northern Bavaria. "When you are hungry, you cannot think of anything else," he told the Star-Ledger.

Biotech corporations are donating expertise and royalty-free licensing technology to make golden rice freely available in developing regions (while preserving commercial rights in the United States and other developed markets). Golden rice -- like all biotech products in the pipeline -- must undergo government and peer review to ensure it’s safe to grow and safe to eat before it’s released to farmers. But it holds enormous potential to address a problem that’s clearly not going away, say experts such as Bruce Chassy, a professor of food microbiology at the University of Illinois.

"We must learn to develop better ways to grow more food for the 4 billion people who will join us in the next 50 years," said Chassy, assistant dean for biotechnology outreach at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "Golden rice shows that biotechnology will help us get there."

References at http://www.whybiotech.com/index.asp?id=2094.