Golden rice has the promise to help prevent millions of deaths and alleviate the suffering of children and adults with VAD and micronutrient malnutrition in developing countries.
Why is the Golden Rice discovery important?
Golden Rice was engineered from normal rice by Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer in the 1990s to help improve human health. Golden Rice has an engineered multi-gene biochemical pathway in its genome. This pathway produces beta-carotene, a molecule that becomes vitamin A when metabolized by humans.
What is the role of Golden Rice in human life?
The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and its national research partners have developed Golden Rice to complement existing interventions to address vitamin A deficiency (VAD). VAD is a serious public health problem affecting millions of children and pregnant women globally.
Is Golden Rice good for the environment?
GE ‘Golden’ rice is highly likely to contaminate non-GE rice, if released to the environment. GE rice contamination will affect traditional, conventional and organic rice farmers because they will lose their markets, especially export markets, which would negatively impact rural livelihoods.
How does Golden Rice benefit the economy?
Nutritional and economic ex ante assessment studies of a GRS have shown that Golden Rice can reduce VAD-related mortalities and diseases at less cost than alternative strategies discussed in the literature. Previous studies for India have shown that about 204,000 life years can be saved annually.
How many lives could Golden Rice save?
It was developed as a humanitarian, non-profit project in an attempt to prevent somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 people, many of them children, dying prematurely every year in poor countries because of vitamin A deficiency.
Is Golden Rice used today?
Golden Rice has been accepted as safe for consumption by the Governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and USA, and registrations have been applied for in Philippines and Bangladesh.
Which is cured by eating Golden Rice?
Thus, Golden Rice may be a cost-effective staple food for combating vitamin A deficiency in rice-eating populations (29).
What are the advantages and disadvantages of Golden Rice?
The advantage of golden rice is that it can be used in areas where vitamin A deficiency is common, so it can help prevent blindness. However, there are also disadvantages. For example: beta carotene levels in golden rice may not be high enough to make a difference.
Who discovered Golden Rice?
Golden Rice was first conceived by Professors Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer in the late 1980s. IRRI became the first licensee of the scientists’ work in 2001.
Why did Golden Rice fail?
Negligible beta carotene content – The current version of the Golden Rice, GR2E contains a negligible amount of beta-carotene (from 3.57 ug/g to 22 ug/g), which the United States Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) also acknowledged, making the product useless in addressing Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) in contrast to
How long does Golden Rice last?
The already meager beta-carotene content in GR2E can also degrade over time, as shown by a study in 2017. [20] Only 60% of the beta-carotene content is retained in Golden Rice after three weeks in storage, and just 13% after 10 weeks.
Where is Golden Rice used?
For countries like Bangladesh and the Philippines where rice is a staple of nearly every meal, beta carotene-enriched Golden Rice can supply up to 30-50 percent of the estimated average vitamin A requirement, particularly for sectors that are most vulnerable to VAD: preschool age children and pregnant or lactating
How has Golden Rice improved human life?
Golden rice is genetically modified to produce beta-carotene, which is not normally present in rice. Beta-carotene is converted into vitamin A when metabolized by the human body. We need vitamin A for healthier skin, immune systems, and vision.
What is the price of Golden Rice?
The avg. market price of Golden Rice in India is Rs 66/ Kilogram.
Can Golden Rice help with blindness?
Golden Rice was developed in the late 1990s by German plant scientists Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer to combat vitamin A deficiency, the leading cause of childhood blindness. Low levels of vitamin A also contribute to deaths from infectious diseases such as measles.
What is Golden Rice how it can prevent child blindness?
Lack of Vitamin A causes night blindness in kids. This can also cause permanent blindness if not rectified by proper nutrition. Golden rice contains Vitamin – A, so blindness is prevented by use of golden rice in poor countries. Golden rice is a transgenic crop that was made to produce Vitamin A.
Is Golden Rice good for you?
The ‘new’ property of Golden Rice, as a result of its colour, is nutrition: it contains beta-carotene (an important source of vitamin A) additional to the carbohydrate energy source of white rice, which is unchanged. Golden Rice is above all a well-being, a nutritional, a medical project.
How Golden Rice is produced?
A japonica variety of rice was engineered with three genes necessary for the rice grain to produce and store beta-carotene. These included two genes from the daffodil plant and a third from a bacterium. Researchers used a plant microbe to ferry in the genes into the plant cells.
Who invented rice?
Archaeologists have unearthed bits of rice from when it was first domesticated in China. Around 10,000 years ago, as the Pleistocene gave way to our current geological epoch, a group of hunter-gathers near China’s Yangtze River began changing their way of life. They started to grow rice.
What vitamins does Golden Rice transform?
Golden rice is a variety of rice produced through genetic engineering, to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, in the edible parts of rice. Beta-carotene is converted into Vitamin A when metabolized by the human body.