Genomics, Genetics, and Breeding for Rice Crop Improvement
A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant Genetics, Genomics and Biotechnology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2021) | Viewed by 24571
Special Issue Editors
Interests: rice molecular genetics; genetic potentials of wild rice species for rice improvement; rice genome engineering; rice molecular breeding
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is the most important cereal crop, feeding more than half of the world’s population as well as being important in science as a model plant of monocots. Since the release of whole genome sequences of the rice reference genome, O. sativa spp. japonica cv. Nipponbare and release of a set of genome-wide simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers and large numbers of rice T-DNA/transposon tagging lines in early 2000’s, genomics and genetics of rice have been remarkably advanced. In addition, next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies with bioinformatics produced a huge amount of sequence information from diverse germplasm, including cultivars, landraces, and wild rice species. NGS techniques and advanced high-throughput genotyping technologies enabled genome-wide association study (GWAS) for rapid identification of novel genes associated with the phenotypes. Recently, new genome engineering tools such as CRISPR/Cas9 and sequence-specific DNA binding protein-based nuclease are well adapted in rice for functional study and direct trait improvement of rice. As a consequence, for the last two decades rice research has been remarkable in terms of many scientific aspects including completion of high quality reference genomes sequences, gene identification, gene functional studies, DNA mark technologies, marker-assisted breeding, and genome engineering.
Despite the tremendous achievements in rice science using advanced resources and technologies, their contributions to rice crop improvement are not highly correlated and there are still big gaps between rice science and rice crop improvement. To date, more than 2,800 genes out of the 39,045 annotated protein-coding genes in rice genome are functionally characterized and some portions of them are well studied at the molecular mechanisms level. However, the identified genes controlling useful agronomic traits are fewer, and the favorable alleles of the genes are already present in many elite rice cultivars, making them inapplicable for breeding modern elite varieties. Most of all, the products of genomics and genetics were not well extended to rice crop improvement.
Therefore, this Special Issue will focus on rice crop improvement by genomics, genetics, and breeding and related topics (original research papers, perspectives, opinions, reviews, modeling approaches and methods) covering genes/QTLs, novel/superior alleles, grain yield, grain quality and nutrition, biotic/abiotic stress, current and emerging problems (direct seeding, rice cultivation in harsh environments such as saline area and iron/aluminum toxicity soils, and mitigation of methane gas emission in rice field), hybrid rice, utilization of wild rice species, genome engineering, and breeding scheme/strategies are most welcome.
Dr. Sung-Ryul Kim
Dr. Chih-Wei Tung
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- Rice genomics
- Rice genetics
- Rice breeding
- Rice yield
- Rice nutrition
- Genome engineering
- CRISPR/Cas
- Wild rice species
- Biotic stress
- Abiotic stress
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