Rice genomics gateway to future cereal improvement

Abstract

There is an urgent need to increase world's food production to meet the ever increasing demand. Rice plays a direct role as the cereal feeding half the world's population and as an experimental workhorse. It has the smallest genome among cereals, has remarkable similarities with other cereals in sequence, structure, order and function of genes. Foreign genes can be incorporated into rice with ease by genetic transformation. Rice genetics is also well studied and understood. All these features have made rice a model cereal for functional genomics. With the availability of the near complete genome sequence, the emphasis is not only on understanding the functions of the predicted 35,000-50,000 genes, but also unraveling how these genes interact to control important agronomic traits under different environmental conditions. This chapter covers the genome-wide molecular techniques currently being employed in rice with the ultimate goal of achieving much needed increases in crop productivity. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.