Weekly Science and Technology Lecture丨Clever use of molecular breeding, this corn has extraordinary nutritional quality!

It has long been a worldwide consensus that agricultural products should improve from increasing output to improving quality. Corn is one of the three major staple foods in my country. China has made remarkable achievements in corn variety improvement, but the road to improvement has not stopped there. Corn still has more value and possibilities. In 2002, Li Jiansheng, a professor at China Agricultural University, focused on improving corn quality.

Professor Li Jiansheng and his team members went deep into the experimental fields. After 14 years of hard research, they completed the scientific research project "Discovery of Important Nutritional Quality Genes of Corn and Application of Molecular Breeding". The project won the second prize of the National Technological Invention Award in 2016.

Creating high-nutrition corn

Li Jiansheng's project team adhered to the original intention of cultivating a batch of corn with "extraordinary" nutritional quality. Provitamin A and vitamin E in corn kernels are important nutritional elements that are beneficial to human health and animal growth and development. How to magnify these advantages and make it a delicious and healthy food?

In order to create a more nutritious corn variety, Li Jiansheng's team cleverly combined biotechnology with traditional breeding technology. They targeted important traits such as provitamin A and vitamin E in corn kernels and successfully cloned the genes that control these nutritional traits through high-density molecular markers. They deeply explored the genetic mechanisms of these genes, developed new functional molecular markers, and finally applied these markers to molecular breeding.

During this process, they successfully cloned several genes that affect the content and composition of provitamin A and vitamin E in corn kernels, and designed multiple functional molecular markers. By combining them with traditional breeding techniques, they cultivated several new corn varieties with high provitamin A and vitamin E, opening up a new path for corn quality breeding.

Using molecular breeding to create high-oil corn

The important role of corn oil in people's lives cannot be ignored. Corn oil is rich in unsaturated fatty acids. It is not only a healthy edible oil, but also an important raw material for high-energy feed. Professor Li Jiansheng is well aware of the value of corn oil, so he decided to lead the team to give full play to the technical advantages and continue to explore the oil-producing traits of corn.

Professor Li Jiansheng's team successfully discovered 72 genes that affect total oil and fatty acid composition and ratio through genome-wide association analysis, and proposed for the first time the theory that "the accumulation of superior alleles is an important genetic basis for increasing corn oil content". Subsequently, superior alleles that affect oil content and composition were discovered, and 6 functional molecular markers were developed. By using these markers, high-oil superior alleles were successfully introduced into the two parents of "Zhengdan 958", one of the most widely planted hybrid corn varieties in my country. Not only did it not change the grain yield, but it also increased the grain oil content by 26.5%. This achievement has set an example for molecular breeding of corn oil.

Professor Li Jiansheng and his team have made corn a high-quality grain that is more nutritious, healthier and tastier through their outstanding research. Their efforts have set an example for improving the quality of agricultural products in my country and contributed to the development of agricultural science and technology. With their efforts, corn will continue to add rich flavor and nutrition to the Chinese table.

Author: Niu Mingze, PhD, Sichuan University

Expert: Zhu Yehua, deputy editor of Science and Technology Review, PhD of Tsinghua University

China Association for Science and Technology Department of Science Popularization

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