Diversity of Rice: In aspects of Nutritional, Medicinal and Water saving Agriculture

Abstract

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is the staple food for people worldwide. Rice cultivation is one of the most vital agricultural activity on earth, almost 90% of Rice being produced in Asia. It is an annual grass of family Gramineae, subfamily Oryzoidea and belongs to genus Oryza. Rice is the seed of the monocot plants. It occupies one fifth of the total land covered under cereal crops. Rice is very nutritious and more than two-thirds of the world's population who depends on the nutritional and medicinal benefits of rice. Moreover, rice as a model crop with fully sequenced genome, relatively small genome size, significant level of polymorphism and large amount of well conserved genetically diverse material, gives unique opportunities to researcher for studying its varietal difference and history of crop improvement using different approaches like development of water saving technology i.e. aerobic rice.