Rod A. Wing, Michael D. Purugganan, and Qifa Zhang

Nature Reviews | Genetics; 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature.

Abstract

(Very important review)

Rice is a staple crop for half the world’s population, which is expected to grow by 3 billion over the next 30 years. It is also a key model for studying the genomics of agroecosystems. This dual role places rice at the centre of an enormous challenge facing agriculture: how to leverage genomics to produce enough food to feed an expanding global population. Scientists worldwide are investigating the genetic variation among domesticated rice species and their wild relatives with the aim of identifying loci that can be exploited to breed a new generation of sustainable crops known as Green Super Rice.

Here, we review how comparative and functional genomic studies of domesticated and wild rice germplasm collections can be used to inform breeding programmes, with an emphasis on how they are contributing to the development of GSR varieties. We discuss insights gained from studying the domestication of Asian rice (Oryza sativa) and African rice (Oryza glaberrima), which occurred on two different continents ~6,000 years apart. We describe how entire germplasm collections are now being sequenced and phenotyped to identify genomic regions that are important for crop productivity and adaptation and how this process has been facilitated by advances in field phenotyping technologies and the availability of an increasing number of nearly gap-free reference genomes covering the breadth of cultivated and wild Oryza diversity. Finally, we address the need for a functional genomics and breeding of these past events can identify beneficial agronomic traits that have been selected for over the course of crop domestication and diversification. Comparative, population and functional genomics approaches can be used to determine what genes are responsible for the selected traits, and this genetic information can potentially be used to shape future breeding efforts.

See: file:///C:/Users/Admin/Downloads/10.1038@s41576-018-0024-z.pdf