Johannesburg, - What if we could create a food plant that defied all those doomsday scenarios where extreme temperatures take us all to oblivion, and instead kept  growing and fruiting regardless of whether it got very hot or very cold?

      "We would never run out of food!" remarked Philip Wigge, a scientist at the Norwich-based John Innes Centre, a member institute of Britain's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

      That day could come sooner than we think - perhaps in the next 10 to 15 years - because Wigge and co-scientist Vinod Kumar have had a crucial breakthrough. They have isolated a "thermometer" gene that helps plants sense temperature, and this could provide a shortcut to creating plants that fruit in any temperature.

      Their findings have been published in the current edition of Cell a US-based scientific journal that is peer-reviewed.

     Scientists across the world have been working to create food crops tolerant to extreme temperatures, some of which are already being grown in Asia. They evolved from a long of  process subjecting grain plants to stresses such as drought conditions, and then isolating genes from those that survived to create new variants.

      Often only conventional breeding processes are used, as many Asian and African countries do not accept genetically modified products, said Baboucarr Manneh, a molecular biologist and coordinator of the Africa Rice Centre's Abiotic Stresses Project in Benin, which is working on developing varieties of rice that will tolerate extreme heat and cold.

      Wigge and Kumar's discovery could potentially push agricultural microbiology forward by leaps and bounds in much the same way that early medicine, which depended on empirical methods to treat diseases, was revolutionized by an increased understanding of bacteria.

      They have isolated a 'thermometer' gene that helps plants sense temperature, and this could provide a shortcut to creating plants that fruit in any temperature

     Time is a critical factor. The impact of extreme temperatures and water stress on food production, brought on by climate change, could be felt in the next 10 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which projects that food production in Africa could be severely compromised by 2020.

      Manneh said the discovery would "cut down" the time it took to find varieties that were more tolerant to extreme temperatures, and "will lead to precision breeding - we won't have to tamper with all the genes."