Golden rice - Biofortification

Golden Rice tackles a public-health problem, not an agronomic one: Vitamin-A deficiency, which is a serious cause of preventable childhood blindness (and worse, in severe cases) in populations where dietary Vitamin-A is genuinely scarce. Ordinary rice endosperm - the edible, starchy part of the grain that most people in Vitamin-A-deficient regions rely on as a dietary staple - naturally contains essentially no beta-carotene, the plant-derived precursor the human body converts into Vitamin-A. Golden Rice, developed by Ingo Potrykus and his research group, was genetically engineered specifically to biosynthesise beta-carotene inside that normally beta-carotene-free endosperm, using recombinant DNA technology to add three separate genes that were not part of the rice plant's native genome: 'psy' (phytoene synthase), sourced from an entirely unrelated ornamental plant, the daffodil Narcissus pseudonarcissus; 'crt-1', sourced from the soil bacterium Erwinia uredovora; and 'lyc' (lycopene cyclase), which - unlike the other two - was actually sourced from wild-type rice endosperm itself, just not normally expressed there in a useful way. Together, this three-gene addition reconstructs a full beta-carotene biosynthesis pathway inside the rice grain that …