As global climate continues to warm, the risk of total crop failure is growing higher and higher. How can crops be made heat-resistant, disease-resistant and high-yielding at the same time? For many years scientists have been "at their wits' end."

Recently, the He Zuhua research group at the Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, discovered a powerful "multipurpose gene" - the ER gene. It not only enables crops to tolerate high temperatures, resist disease and achieve high yields, but also improves crops' water use efficiency and promotes crop growth and development.

This research result provides an important technical means for the efficient breeding of crops and garden plants. The paper has been published online in the international top journal Nature Biotechnology.

Previous research held that equipping crops with "multiple effects" at the same time was a basically impossible task: crops with special functions such as high-temperature resistance and pest and disease resistance either "grow poorly" with thin, unfilled plants, or "develop slowly" so that high yields are hard to guarantee.

To address this, after more than ten years of sustained effort, He Zuhua's team discovered that the ER gene in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana has a powerful special function. It seems to apply a layer of sunscreen-like, disease-resistant protective film to plant cells, making the cell membrane more intact and less prone to rupture, so the plant develops more healthily and fully.

From this, He Zuhua's team found that not only Arabidopsis but also crops such as rice, tomato and corn contain ER-series genes.

"We planted rice with higher-activity ER genes in Changsha, Wuhan, Shanghai and many other places. The experimental results showed that when ordinary rice had already withered and died under high temperatures, the rice carrying higher-activity ER genes could still achieve a seed-setting rate of more than 40%," He Zuhua said. In addition, the ER gene can increase plants' water use efficiency by 50%.

The research team believes that the ER gene is a gene locus of important biological significance. It is certain that in the future the ER gene will have broad application potential in high-temperature resistance and disease resistance breeding of different crops, including monocotyledonous grain crops such as rice and dicotyledonous cash crops such as tomato.

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