Perennial Rice – Plant Once, Harvest Continuously for Years – Makes Its Debut at the 2022 Hi-Tech Fair

Zeng Jianpeng (center), Member of the Standing Committee and Deputy District Mayor of Yantian District, Shenzhen, and Cao Yun (first from the right), Secretary of the Party Leadership Group and Director of Yantian District Bureau of Science, Technology and Innovation, visited the booth of BGI Group.

On November 15th, the 24th China International High-Tech Achievement Fair (hereinafter referred to as "Hi-Tech Fair") grandly opened in Shenzhen. BGI Bioverse made a wonderful debut with its perennial rice "Manla No.1" and Yunnan Hani Terraced Red Rice.

"Manla No. 1" is a perennial rice variety derived from Yunda 26, jointly launched by BGI Bioverse and Yunnan University in October this year.

The team successfully transformed annual rice into perennial rice and achieved the perennialization of cultivated varieties through interspecific distant hybridization—using the perennial African wild rice Oryza longistaminata (endowed with rhizomatous biological traits) as the male parent and annual Asian cultivated rice as the female parent—combined with rhizome-targeted molecular marker-assisted selection technology.

Professor Hu Fengyi’s team conducts research in the experimental fields

Once planted, perennial rice can be continuously harvested without tillage for 3–4 years. After harvesting, there is no need for re-ploughing or seedling transplanting; it can achieve "one planting, multiple harvests" just like Chinese chives, greatly reducing labor costs.

It is understood that the team has developed multiple perennial rice varieties to date, including Perennial Rice 23, Yunda 25, and Yunda 107. As the world’s only commercializable perennial food crop, perennial rice has been included in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)’s "International Agricultural Technology Innovations".

Professor Hu Fengyi’s team inspects the growth of perennial rice "Yunda 26" in the fields.

In addition to perennial rice, the Multi-fruit Eggplant Tree launched by BGI Bioverse is also a "super species" that subverts the traditional vegetable production model.

Developed based on wild solanaceous plants, the Multi-fruit Eggplant Tree features perennial woody rootstocks. Through next-generation grafting technology, multiple varieties of annual herbaceous solanaceous crops (such as eggplant, tomato, chili pepper, and pepino melon) are grafted onto a single tree simultaneously. This enables one tree to bear multiple crops and produce fruits year-round, making it an innovative eggplant cultivation model pioneered in China with epoch-making significance.

At the exhibition site, another product of BGI Bioverse — Yunnan Yuanyang · Hani Terraced Red Rice — also attracted many visitors to stop and take a look.

Yuan Yang Hani Terraced Fields need no introduction. Blessed with abundant water resources, humid air and ever-changing mists, people of various ethnic groups, dominated by the Hani people, have created the unique agricultural civilization wonder of Hani Terraced Fields by leveraging the local geographical and climatic conditions featuring "four seasons on one mountain, and different weather within ten miles".

Recorded history shows that the Hani Terraced Fields have a history of more than 1,300 years, with the Yuan Yang Hani Terraced Fields as the central area.

In April 2002, when BGI published the first crop plant genome in Science, the cover featured the Yuan Yang Hani Terraced Fields blanketed with rice.

Twenty years later, from rice to red rice, BGI Bioverse has carried on this bond and launched this terraced red rice with precious connotations and cultural heritage. Leveraging the unique geographical, climatic and water resources in the core area of the terraced fields, it is cultivated via primitive farming methods: manual plowing and weeding, irrigation with mountain spring water, and fertilization with farmyard manure. It is truly an ecologically-friendly crop in its natural state.

The Hi-Tech Fair is China’s largest and most influential science and technology exhibition. Leveraging BGI’s strengths in genomic big data platforms, BGI Bioverse has consistently carried out agricultural breeding innovation and cultivar development by adopting genomic big data-driven technologies such as whole-genome design breeding, gene editing and synthetic biology. Going forward, it will continue to commit itself to integrating desert soil improvement technology, to realize the coordinated "sky-earth-life" development of transforming deserts into carriers for green ecology and agricultural cultivation.