Pinoy in US discovers Chinese roots of all rice varieties

A Filipino professor of genetics at New York University — Michael Purugganan — has helped discover that all of the world's domesticated rice varieties may have come from a single place in China thousands of years ago. Purugganan graduated from the University of the Philippines in 1985. He earned his Master's degree at Columbia University in the US in 1986 and received his Ph.D from the University of Georgia, also in the US, in 1993. Aside from being the Associate Director of NYU's Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, he is also a professor of biology and a Dorothy Schiff professor of genomics at NYU. Genomics is a branch of genetics that deals with the study of the genomes or the entirety of an organism's hereditary information. According to a press statement of NYU, Purugganan's team traced back "thousands of years of evolutionary history through large-scale gene re-sequencing." The team concluded that rice originated in China. "Their findings, which appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), indicate that domesticated rice may have first appeared as far back as approximately 9,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley of China," the NYU said. NYU's findings According to NYU, "Asian rice, Oryza sativa, is one of world’s oldest crop species. It is also a very diverse crop, with tens of thousands of varieties known throughout the world." "Two major subspecies of rice — japonica and indica — represent most of the world’s varieties," NYU added. Purugganan's group re-sequenced 630 gene fragments on selected chromosomes from a diverse set of wild and domesticated rice varieties. "Using new modeling techniques, which had previously been used to look at genomic data in human evolution, their results showed that the gene sequence data was more consistent with a single origin of rice," NYU said. The NYU statement quoted Purugganan as saying “As rice was brought in from China to India by traders and migrant farmers, it likely hybridized extensively with local wild rice." “So domesticated rice that we may have once thought originated in India actually has its beginnings in China," Purugganan said. - VVP/HS, GMA News