Many people don't stop and think about where our food supply comes from.  Do we have enough to supply other nations including ourselves?  "Today, one U.S. farmer provides food for 128 people -- 94 in the U.S. and 34 in countries outside the U.S." (NCGI)The next question that should be asked is about the growing world population.  Will we have enough food to supply a world population that is continually growing?  If not, what are we to do to increase the food supply?  The answer to this question is a difficult one.  Technology has worked in the past to answer this question, but the solution only lasts for a period of time.  It is time for new developments to be made.  We can do this by observing and studying the genetic code which carries the solution to break through technology.

Progress in agricultural and environmental technologies is hampered by a slower rate of gene discovery in plants than in animals.  The vast pool of genes in plants, however, will be an important resource for insertion of genes, by biotechnological procedures, into an array of plants, generating unique germ plasmas not achieveable by conventional breeding.  It just became clear that genomes of grasses have evolved in a manner analogous to Lego blocks.  Although some genome have become very large, the genome with the fewest stuffer pieces, the rice genome, is the Rosetta Stone of all the bigger grass genomes.  This means that sequencing the rice genome as anchor genome of the grasses, such as corn and wheat, without the need to sequence each of these genomes independently.  The sequencing of the entire genome of rice as anchor genome for the grasses will accelerate plant gene discovery in many important crops such as corn, wheat and rice.
 
 

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