The rice pre-breeding pilot study of the Project is being implemented by two partner institutions: the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics of Cornell University. The International Rice Research Institute is a center of the CGIAR consortium that focuses on rice research and the conservation of rice diversity, and is headquartered in Los Baños in the Philippines. Cornell University’s Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics hosts an already existing rice breeding program that focuses on the use of wild rice species, and is located in Ithaca, New York.
The objective of the Project’s rice pre-breeding work is to develop new genetic resources using genomic tools to help predict the effect of introducing different genes from rice wild relatives into cultivated varieties of indica and japonica rice. Overall, this approach is designed to help discover useful forms of genetic diversity that are hidden in low-yielding wild rice species and use these genetic resources to improve the resilience and adaptive potential of the world’s most productive rice cultivars.
The rice pre-breeding project activities are designed to ultimately provide information to breeders that will enable them to make more efficient use of the genetic diversity of wild rice found within gene banks. The genotyping efforts conducted as part of this work will offer a useful tool for plant breeders hoping to identify genetic material in wild rice species with potential to improve elite rice lines through hybridization. Specifically, Cornell and IRRI are focusing on genotyping five to six wild rice species that are closely related to domesticated rice, and then evaluating and characterizing the backcross populations resulting from hybridization with elite rice cultivars.
