“Cadmium (Cd) contamination poses a serious threat to global food safety. As a toxic and carcinogenic heavy metal, cadmium can accumulate in agricultural soils through industrialization and urbanization before entering the human food chain. Rice is especially vulnerable because it absorbs more cadmium than other major cereal crops, making it one of the largest dietary sources of cadmium exposure for nearly half the world's population…

Addressing this challenge, a research team led by Dr. Sheng Huang and Jian Feng Ma from the Institute of Plant Science and Resources, Okayama University, Japan, together with Jiayang Li's group from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, used precise base-editing technology to identify a beneficial point mutation in the rice metal transporter gene OsNramp5.

Through saturation mutagenesis targeting OsNramp5, the researchers screened hundreds of genome-edited rice lines to identify variants that accumulated less cadmium while maintaining normal manganese uptake and plant performance.”

From Phys.org.