Japanese researchers have created a strain of rice that can act as a vaccine and last for more than a year and a half at room temperature.

Immunologist Hiroshi Kiyono of the University of Tokyo and his colleagues inserted the genetic material from the microbe responsible for producing cholera toxin into a rice plant, whose genome has recently been sequenced. The plants produced the toxin and when the rice grains were fed to mice they provoked immunity from the diarrhea-causing bacterium.