Chinese scientists have found the genetic basis of what makes rice hybrids perform better than their inbred parents, offering a potential boon for breeding by precise molecular design to meet global food demands.

They have discovered how the more than 400 genetic locations that determine the traits of rice are expressed in hybrid rice varieties, which will serve as navigators to produce new rice products of high yield and quality, said Han Bin, leading researcher of the team and director of the Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, a branch of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The discovery, made after eight years of study, was published on the website of the scientific journal Nature on Thursday.