Rice, the staple food of billions, faces a growing threat: climate change. Rising temperatures and increasingly extreme heat are having a negative impact on rice yields around the world.
According to the scieific news departme of Tekna Technology Media, researchers are investigating ways to make rice plas more resista to harsh conditions. A team of horticulturalists from Nankai University in China has come up with a surprising solution: zinc oxide nanoparticles. They say that spraying a solution coaining these particles on rice plas increases their ability to withstand heat stress. “We show that foliar application of zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) significaly increases grain yield and nutritional quality of rice during the hot season (HW),” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Extreme heat is a serious threat to rice production and causes a significa reduction in yield and even complete destruction of the crop. To reduce the devastating effects of heat from climate change, scieists are trying to develop strategies to protect plas. Rece research has shown that foliar application of zinc nanoparticles is a more efficie method of delivering zinc to plas, because these particles can penetrate io leaf pores. Zinc nanoparticles are a common ingredie in sunscreen formulations.
Irigued, the team investigated the poteial of zinc oxide to protect rice yield from extreme heat. According to Phys.org, in the new study, researchers created a custom greenhouse and exposed rice plas to a simulated heat wave. The results showed that the plas that were treated with zinc oxide nanoparticles had a 22.1% higher yield than the corol group and their seeds had a higher nutritional quality.
This study shows that the use of zinc oxide nanoparticles can be an effective solution to increase the resistance of rice against climate changes and improve the production of this importa product. This finding can create a revolution in sustainable agriculture.
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