INGER@40—and the crossroads |
INGER, the world’s largest agricultural research network, has a long history associated with milestones in rice breeding. Overall, more than 1,120 of its tested lines were released as varieties in 74 countries. Now celebrating its 40th year, INGER faces a different kind of challenge: its own sustainable future. |
IRRI, Gene Hettel | Aug 12, 2015
INGER, the world’s largest agricultural research network, has a long history associated with milestones in rice breeding. Overall, more than 1,120 of its tested lines were released as varieties in 74 countries. Now celebrating its 40th year, INGER faces a different kind of challenge: its own sustainable future.
Figure: Now celebrating its 40th year INGER) has released around 55,550 breeding lines that have been evaluated by hundreds of rice scientists at more than 600 research stations in 85 countries. Overall, more than 1,100 INGER-tested lines have been released as varieties in 74 countries. These pooled test materials from around the world have brought much needed genetic diversity to farmers’ fields. However, after 4 decades, it is time to look at INGER in retrospect and reflect to review what has been achieved and to brainstorm for the future. (Photo: Isagani Serrano)
Research at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and other international agricultural research institutes (ARIs) is about discovery—and sharing those discoveries with partners in the national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES) to alleviate hunger and poverty in the world. One research partnership that has been truly successful in such sharing is the International Network for Genetic Evaluation of Rice (INGER), founded by IRRI in 1975 and celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.
According to Ed Redoña, who served as INGER coordinator at IRRI from 2006 to 2014 and currently a rice breeder at Mississippi State University’s Delta Research and Extension Center, INGER—known as the International Rice Testing and Improvement Program (IRTIP) prior to 1989—has been one of the longest-running germplasm networks in CGIAR.
“Through its primary mechanism of international nurseries (see figure), over the past four decades, nearly 3 million seed samples representing around 55,500 entries of advanced lines have been shared for evaluation by hundreds of rice scientists at more than 600 research stations in 85 countries (see map below),” says Dr. Redoña.
Currently, nine international nurseries are in the network (four observational ecosystem-related for the irrigated, temperate, rainfed lowland, and upland environments and five stress-related for heat, soil, blast, bacterial blight, and brown planthopper) and two special nurseries (irrigated and rainfed) for Green Super Rice.
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