When we cross biofortified rice to conventional rice we often see large yield variation in the resulting progeny. What accounts for this variation? In this study we used a distance-based linear model (DistLM) to identify plant tissue nutrient predictors accounting for agro-morphological variation in high-yielding and low-yielding progeny of biofortified rice. The results show that low-yielding progeny often have overaccumulation of grain-zinc and/or panicle-magnesium, while these two traits do not appear in high-yielding progeny. By selecting against these overaccumulation traits we can rapidly produce high-yielding varieties of iron and zinc biofortified rice.
To learn more read the full paper here:
Moreno-Moyano LT, Bonneau JP, Sánchez-Palacios JT, Tohme J and Johnson AAT (2016) Association of increased grain iron and zinc concentrations with agro-morphological traits of biofortified rice. Frontiers in Plant Science 7: 1463. PDF