Doctor. VO CONG THANH The Genetics – Cross Breeding Laboratory (the Department of Agriculture and Applied Biology, Can Tho University)

Since 1990, Vietnam has produced more than enough rice and been able to export it again. Vietnam reached a rice production of about 36 million tons in 2006 and over 38 million tons in 2008. The increasing rice production has helped the exporters make breakthroughs in the creating markets or bidding to provide rice to foreign countries. However, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization said that Vietnam would not be able to export rice from 2020 on because of its fast urbanization, transportation development, population increase … and the impact of climatic change.

There are about 1 billion hungry people in the world going to bed without eating. Therefore, a researching for a super-high yield rice of over 10 tons/ ha is badly needed for the world’s development. Fortune has smiled upon us as a super-high yield rice has been developed in Can Tho University toward the increasing its living mass. In reality, the researching efforts have been continuous. Beside the increasing living mass of straw and stubble to make ethanol to mix with fossil fuel, there is a new researching tendency to enhance the ability to produce biological fuel from straw to make the planting rice more profitable. This is the applying advance technology in growing rice.

Climatic change continues to be a challenge for breeding researchers in selecting a rice strains that can bear well the salinity penetration into the cultivating lands. New techniques are being used to carry out the strategy of selecting rice strains matching climatic change.

Protein cataphoresis technique (SDS-PAGE protein) alters the amylose content to raise the grain’s quality, that is, it decreases the amylose content to make rice softer and increases the protein content of high amylose rice strains. This is necessary because traditional winter-spring and high-yield rice strains will degenerate after being planted for a long time due to different reasons so it is easy for the grain’s quality to differ from the original description. Thanks to this technique, BN1 rice strain – mutated from IR50404 – is resistant to brown-back hoppers, able to stand alum soil, long-grained, low in the amylose content (22% instead of 24% in the strain IR 50404). So BN1 is superior to the degenerating IR50404 in terms of productivity, brown-back hopper resistance and can replace IR50404.

The selection of new rice strains and domestication of the rice strains being cultivated in the region to increase the quality will be the main way for the Mekong Delta to go in the coming time. The SDS-PAGE cataphoresis technique should be used to speed up the selection of high quality rice strains.

Additionally, a “micro satellite” technique better for detecting genes of scent has been used in the world to select aromatic rice strains. Especially, this technique helps define exactly a certain linage carrying the gene of scent or not. If a strain is aromatic it can also stand salinity because both two genes of aroma and salinity stay in chromosome number 8. It is not a difficult job to grow aromatic rice in Vietnam now. This aromatic rice strain which can also stand salinity in the model of rice – shrimp crop will meet the Global Gap standards for safe rice because no pesticides or chemical substances are used and this will make Vietnamese rice’s edge in the future.
From studies using SDS-PAGE protein cataphoresis technique, signs indicating genes of fragrant and salinity have been detected and can be used right away in selecting job. Based on the above result it can be concluded that the job of breeding rice strains against salinity is feasible. The Genetics – Cross Breeding Laboratory (the Department of Agriculture and Applied Biology, Can Tho University) has raised rice strains’ quality by using SDS-PAGE technique which has a number of untapped potentialities.

According to Doctor Hirata and businessman Takishi Nakashima, Dainichi Techno Green, Inc: Asia is a region abundant in materials but slow in development. Scientists must be pioneers with their researching. In the mild zone of Japan, making ethanol from straw is considered to be mad because of the small sources of straw. However, Vietnam is abundant in straw. Strategies to collect straw are needed beside strategies to harvest grain to show farmers their bright future. The fact that farmers want to carry out the strategies will speed scientists’ researches.

However, to get breakthroughs, from the above results, a question arouse from reality is how to allocate investment resources in right place with right emphasis to make researches and application precede the climatic change.

Adapted from www.baohaugiang.com.vn