Understanding this mechanism could lead to ways to improve the production of rice, the most important food source for more than half the world's population. This research appears in the September 2000 issue of The Plant Cell.
Most plants have enzymes that are activated by ordinary light to repair UV damage.
But Norin 1, an excellent breeding strain with good taste characteristics that was used to generate many commercially important strains in Japan, was shown by Jun Hidema of Japan's Tohoku University to be ultrasensitive to UV damage. This could become an even more serious problem as earth's UV-filtering ozone layer continues to thin. Suspecting that Norin 1's UV sensitivity could be the result of a DNA repair deficiency, Betsy Sutherland, a Brookhaven Lab biologist, invited Hidema to her lab to investigate the matter. Their initial work, published in 1997 in Plant Physiology, associated the UV sensitivity with a repair deficiency, but didn't reveal the origin of that problem. Then, when activated by light, the enzyme repairs the damage and detaches.