A team of plant biologists believes that common rice varieties, domesticated over thousands of years and now grown around the world, may have their ancestry in northern Australia.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 7 minutes 53 seconds 7 m Dr Robert Henry says wild rice from Cape York has links to varieties domesticated in Asia, and could help to establish new rice growing regions in Australia's north ( Marty McCarthy ) Download 3.6 MB

The findings have been published in the journal Scientific Reports, in an article titled 'Relationships of wild and domesticated rices (Oryza AA genome species) based upon whole chloroplast genome sequences'.

The report concludes that the varieties of rice grown today have genetics that can be traced back to "uncontaminated" wild rice from Australia's remote Cape York.

Co-author professor Robert Henry, the director of the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI), said his team's study found rice varieties developed in Asia over thousands of years may have originated in Australia.

"We are reporting in Scientific Reports on the relationship between wild and domesticated rice species, including the species we grow in northern Australia, particularly Cape York," Mr Henry said.

"We are confirming that these Australian populations are important relatives of domesticated rice. It is quite possible that these have an ancestral relationship.

"The analysis we are doing shows that the rice populations in northern Australia are very diverse genetically, with much more variation than those we find further north in Asia.

"This suggests that maybe the origins are in northern Australia, it's a centre of diversity and a possibly also the centre of origin of these important species."

Freshly harvested native rice ( Supplied: QAAFI )

Mr Henry said his team analysed the evolutionary relationships of rice to reach the conclusion.

"The complication we have is that rice has been grown in Asia for thousands of years and the wild and domesticated populations have inbred, but it's only in northern Australia that is likely to be uncontaminated by the impact of human domestication," he said.

"We believe the populations of rice in the north represent what rice might have looked like before human intervention 7,000 years ago when rice was first domesticated."

Researchers hope that understanding the genetic history of rice, and its ancestral links to Australian wild rice, can help to boost world rice production to feed a growing global population.

"We don't have the increases in rice productivity that we need to keep pace with the projected demand out to the middle of the century," Mr Henry said.

"So this resource will help us fill that gap in terms of the productivity we need in rice globally."

Mr Henry said the breeding qualities inherent in native rice from Cape York were invaluable.

"These represent the gene pools from which we can breed the rices of the future, it's how we access the diversity we need to adapt rice product to climate change and new diseases in future," he said.

"Knowing where to find the genetic variation is very important if we are to have food security and be able to access the diversity we need to continue to produce rice into the future.

"These wild populations have characteristics that are important for rice. They are inter-fertile with domesticated rice, so we can readily cross breed them.

"We can introduce pest and disease resistances from Australian material that will provide for greater food security anywhere in the world."

Wild rice could help unlock the secret to building large rice industries in northern Australia

Despite vast supplies of water and an ideal climate, northern Australia has struggled to establish itself as a rice growing region.

Attempts to build a rice industry on the Adelaide River at Humpty Doo, near Darwin in the Northern Territory, failed in the 1950s.

The Burdekin, south of Townsville, is now making the slow transition from cane to aerobic rice, but quantities grown there are in the thousands of tonnes, compared to the millions grown in the southern Riverina region.

Global rice producer SunRice recently completed a takeover of a local Burdekin mill, owned by Blue Ribbon Rice, and is encouraging cane farmers to try planting rice instead.

Professor Robert Henry said the emerging industry could be given a boost by wild rice, which is naturally suited to local conditions.

"We have had a small amount of rice production in northern Australia, but wild rice emphasises the potential of this area because it is a native plant," he said.

"I think it indicates there is a real potential to explore producing rice varieties that are very specifically adapted to production in northern Australia, and they could provide an opportunity to do that quickly."

Robert Henry says northern Australia contains a diverse range of uncontaminated native rice that could be used to help boost rice production around the world ( Supplied: QAAFI )

Mr Henry said rice types being grown in the Burdekin at the moment had not been bred with wild rice, but he said there was the potential for that to happen in the not too distant future.

"Commercial production in the north is using material from conventional sources, rices originally bred for production in southern Australia or elsewhere," he said.

"We have not begun to introduce local genetic resources into the varieties being grown."

Rather than cross breeding, Dr Henry said another option for the Burdekin was to begin growing commercial quantities of wild rice, and marketing it as a purely local and native Australian rice.

"We could produce novel rices that could be regarded as an Indigenous product, something originating from northern Australia which would have particular appeal to consumers," he said.

"It is a distinct and additional possibility to using wild rice as a source of breeding material to assist mainstream or conventional rices."

Native rice could be a potential gold mine, with the rare commodity capable of fetching as high as $120 per kilogram.

Mr Henry said breeding elements of wild rice into existing varieties, as well as starting up a native rice industry, was possible within a decade.

"I don't believe it will be difficult to work with this [wild rice] material, it seems to be close genetically to domesticated rice," he said.

"These things could happen in a relatively short period of time, relative to the timescale we normally see for these sorts of innovations in agriculture.

"Certainly within five to 10 years we could see both of these things happening. "

QAAFI is a partnership between the Queensland Government and the University of Queensland, with a focus on developing sustainable and competitive tropical and sub-tropical food, fibre and agribusiness industries.