As a step toward boosting rice production to meet a projected 25 percent increase in demand by 2030, researchers from three Asian institutions today announced the release of the genetic sequences of 3,000 rice lines.
“The 3,000 genomes will help us explore new genes needed to create new adaptive varieties; this is becoming increasingly important to sustain rice productivity and to ensure food security under the impact of climate change,” says Hei Leung, a plant geneticist at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines, and one of the scientists involved in the project.
The backers hope that this genetic information will lead to identifying genes for draught, disease, and pest resistance as well as tolerance for poor soils. The sequencing effort was a collaboration among IRRI; BGI in Shenzhen, China; and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology funded the project.The entire data set is available at the journal’s affiliated database, GigaDB. Seeds of all of the rice lines are held by the International Rice Genebank Collection housed at IRRI.
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