红水稻是一种杂草，这种杂草会影响水稻的产量和品质，所以稻农非常讨厌这些红水稻。但是由于红水稻和种植水稻属于同种，所以能杀灭红水稻的除草剂同样也会杀死水稻。
??现在美国国家自然基金（NSF）资助Washington大学St. Louis分校的植物进化学家112万美元，进行一项为期2年的计划来研究两者之间的分子差异，这能帮助稻农除去野草。这项计划叫做植物基因组比较测序计划。
??Washington大学的生物学助理教授Kenneth M. Olsen说：“我们在寻找造成两者之间差异的可能基因。而对这些差异了解越多就能更好的帮助控制野草。这项研究最大优势在于我们掌握了种植水稻的整个基因组，所以能很方便的寻找感兴趣的基因。”Olsen和同事，Massachusetts大学的Ana Caicedo，美国农业部的Yulin Jia博士将测试两种假设。其中之一是红水稻是由水稻野生化得来的，另一种是杂草从亚洲传入美洲然后杂交形成。
??Olsen认为红水稻有很多野生物种的特征，他说：“通过对基因的分析，我们可以找到这些特征的起源，它们是否来自外来物种的杂交？或者是由水稻去驯化得来？”
??为了控制这种杂草，稻农想出了很多办法，其中一些能去除很大一部分的红水稻，但是这些杂草种子能在土壤中存活20年，而且它们经常发生变异，其中一些看起来和水稻没有区别，它们很难被区分出来。而Olsen希望这项研究能帮助找到控制这些杂草的办法。
英文原文：
Plant Biologist Checks Out 'Rice Gone Bad'
Red rice sounds like a New Orleans dish or a San Francisco treat. But it's a weed, the biggest nuisance to American rice growers, who are the fourth largest exporters of rice in the world. And rice farmers hate the pest, which, if harvested along with domesticated rice, reduces marketability and contaminates seed stocks.
Complicating matters is the fact that red rice and cultivated rice are exactly the same species, so an herbicide cannot be developed that seeks out only red rice. It would kill cultivated rice, too.
But now a plant evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) at $1.12 million for two years to perform genetic studies on red rice to understand molecular differences between the two that someday could provide the basis for a plan to eradicate the weed. The particular NSF program funding the research is the Plant Genome Comparative Sequencing Program.
Kenneth M. Olsen, Ph.D., Washington University assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, believes that gene flow is one factor that has been at work.
“We are looking for candidate genes that underlie particular traits that differ between the two,” said Olsen. “Knowing more about the traits could help in potentially controlling the weed. We have a key advantage in this research in that we know the complete cultivated rice genome, so it's fairly easy to target genes of interest.”
Olsen and his colleagues, Ana Caicedo, Ph.D., of the University of Massachusetts, and Yulin Jia, Ph.D., of the United States Department of Agriculture National Rice Research Center, will test at least two hypotheses. One is that red rice is rice that's gone feral, or gone bad.
“In this scenario, you have a sort of selection favoring the weedy version of the crop that out-competes the crop itself,” he said. “That's called de-domestication.”
Another possibility, which is not mutually exclusive, is that weedy rice was introduced into the Americas from Asia, where weedy hybrids of the cultivated species and the wild species occur. These weedy strains then took hold in U.S. soils and began contaminating the U.S. cultivated species.
Meet the candidates
Olsen says that the weed has many characteristics of a wild species.
“By looking at candidate genes and those genes surrounding them we can test the hypotheses of the origins of traits and see if the traits have been introduced by hybridization of weedy and wild species, or, conversely, we can look at the molecular level to see if the de-domestication phenomenon is going on.”
To control red rice infestations, growers often will rotate crops away from rice to soybeans, for instance. And there are cultivation techniques that can eliminate most of the threat, although another nasty feature of the weed is its dormancy - its seed can lie viable in soils for up to 20 years.
There also is a great amount of variation in different red rice strains. Some look remarkably like cultivated rice and behave like cultivated rice. The plants are as tall as cultivated rice and flower at the same time. These “crop mimics” are difficult to spot.
Olsen hopes understanding trait differences can lead to eradication of red rice.
“We're looking for anything that exploits the difference between the crop and the weed and the way that the weed grows versus the way that the crop grows,” he said. “That's the way to eradicate it.”
