Receives the Outstanding Technologist Award, Group Category, 2010

On 11 October 2010, the Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Technology under the Patronage of H.M. the King held a press conference announcing the recipients of the Outstanding Technologist and Young Technologist awards for 2010. The Rice Gene Discovery Unit received the Outstanding Technologist Award, Group category, 

for fragrant and glutinous rice breeding technology. The research team used DNA marker technology to help select rice varieties that are fragrant and resistant to pests and diseases, as well as to environments unfavorable to rice growth, such as flash flooding, and was able to breed 8 fragrant and glutinous rice lines (all under patent application). The varieties developed and popularly grown in practice by farmers include Hom Chonlasit rice, Pin Kaset rice, Sin Lek rice and RD6 fragrant glutinous rice (most farmers in the Northeast and North, namely in Chaiyaphum, Udon Thani, Sakon Nakhon, Phrae and Nan, now use the RD6 fragrant glutinous line for about 80% of the growing area). The Rice Gene Discovery Unit is a research unit under the collaboration between BIOTEC and Kasetsart University, with Assoc. Prof. Dr. Apichart Vanavichit as research team leader and 21 co-researchers. It received the award for its work “Technology for increasing aroma (2-acetyl-pyrroline) to improve the efficiency of breeding fragrant and glutinous rice”, which consists of 2 important technologies. 

Technology for increasing aroma compounds in rice: the research team discovered the gene controlling the aroma of Khao Dawk Mali rice using a map-based cloning method (not GMO), and so found the process that makes rice accumulate the compound 2-acetyl-pyrroline (2AP), the main aroma compound of all rice varieties, to raise aroma levels in other varieties using a functional marker method (Aromarker) that can transfer the aroma trait of jasmine rice to other high-yielding but non-fragrant lines, producing new high-yielding fragrant varieties that farmers are increasingly growing, such as Hom Chonlasit, Pin Kaset and Sin Lek. In irrigated fields, these fragrant rice varieties yield more than 1 ton/rai, more than 50% above the original varieties.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Apichart Vanavichit, research team leader, stressed the importance of biotechnology, saying:  “Biotechnology is important in plant breeding. It is an investment in the first stage of the work, and once it succeeds, we can go straight on to multiplying the variety.”