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Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Mercier is awarded together with four other researchers for introducing asexual reproduction through seeds into rice, an innovation that could hugely simplify efforts to propagate elite plant varieties, thus revolutionizing agriculture and contributing significantly to food security.
Raphael Mercier, director at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, has been awarded the 2025 VinFuture Special Prize for Innovators with Outstanding Achievements in Emerging Fields. The Prize, bestowed at a ceremony in Hanoi, Vietnam, on the 5th of December 2025 honors scientific research and technological breakthroughs with the potential to make a significant difference in the daily lives of millions of people. Mercier and colleagues Delphine Mieulet, Emmanuel Guiderdoni, Imtiyaz Khanday, and Venkatesan Sundaresan have been awarded for their work in establishing a system that allows for elite plant varieties to make genetically identical copies of themselves over generations. They demonstrated this method in rice – a staple food for more than 3.5 billion people worldwide.
Hybrid vigor refers to the phenomenon in which offspring have superior performance compared to their two genetically different parents. This is commonly seen in plants, where the first-generation hybrids between two lines are more robust, grow faster, are more productive, or more resistant to disease than either parent line. Thus, the phenomenon of hybrid vigor is obviously of great interest to agriculture. However, when hybrids themselves undergo sexual reproduction, resulting in genetic reassortment, these beneficial hybrid traits are lost in the next generation, meaning that hybrid seeds need to be generated by controlled crosses – at great cost and with painstaking effort. Mercier and his collaborators have devised a powerful strategy that will make it much easier and cheaper for plant breeders and farmers to harness the huge benefits of hybrid vigor in agriculture. They were able to introduce an asexual mode of reproduction through clonal seeds into rice, allowing self-propagation of hybrids. This asexual reproduction, called apomixis, gives rise to identical offspring and occurs naturally in a number of wild plant species but not in major crops.
In his acceptance speech, Prof. Mercier highlighted how basic, curiosity-driven research enabled a profound understanding of critical aspects of sexual reproduction and led to a groundbreaking application – “the innovation of clonal reproduction through seeds, which we celebrate today”. Mercier and his team, then based at the Jean-Pierre Bourgin Institute for Plant Science in Versailles, have used the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana to delve deep into the mechanics of one of the two key steps of sexual reproduction, meiosis. It is during this specialized cell division that genetic material is exchanged between chromosomes, generating diversity in the gametes and in the progeny. During meiosis, the number of chromosomes is also reduced by two resulting in gametes containing half of the genetic information from their parents. The union of male and female gametes during fertilization restores the initial number of chromosomes.
Based on what they learned about meiosis in Arabidopsis, Mercier and his team made targeted mutations that disrupted the key hallmarks of meiotic division, among them genetic exchange between chromosomes. This allowed them to convert meiosis, which results in genetically diverse gametes, into mitosis, a type of cell division that results in two daughter cells identical to their parental cells. They call their system MiMe for Mitosis instead of Meiosis. Mercier and his team then collaborated with Mieulet and Guiderdoni in CIRAD Montpelier to introduce MiMe into rice, obtaining gametes containing all the genetic information of the parental plant. This was an important step but was not in itself sufficient for synthetic apomixis. To achieve this, it is necessary for the female clonal gametes to undergo parthenogenesis, i.e., to develop into embryos without any fertilization. Separately, at the University of California, Davis, Khanday and Sundaresan had been working on exactly this topic. They found that parthenogenesis could be induced by expressing a gene in the female gamete called BBM1 that is normally only expressed after fertilization. In a transatlantic collaboration, the five scientists and their teams generated and characterized rice that combined both MiMe and parthenogenesis – they had achieved synthetic apomixis in an important crop species.
The VinFuture Special Prize for Innovators with Outstanding Achievements in Emerging Fields is bestowed by the Vietnam-based VinFuture Foundation, which was established to create meaningful change in the everyday lives of millions of people by honoring transformational technological innovations. The core values of the not-for-profit foundation are Equity, Global Reach, Sustainability, and Pioneering.
Raphael Mercier
mercier@mpipz.mpg.de
Raphael Mercier
Source: S. Geiger
Copyright: S. Geiger
Criteria of this press release:
Journalists
Biology
transregional, national
Personnel announcements
English
Raphael Mercier
Source: S. Geiger
Copyright: S. Geiger
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