Informatics of Wild Relatives of Rice

Abstract

The wild species of rice are expected to harbour novel beneficial alleles which have been lost from cultivated rice during the process of domestication. This unchecked loss of alleles has made cultivated rice varieties more susceptible to the changing climatic conditions. Therefore, to develop climate-resilient rice crops, it is desirable to transfer the beneficial alleles from the wild rice species to the cultivated ones. In this direction, efforts are underway to completely unlock the genetic blueprint of the wild relatives of rice, which should facilitate the identification of novel alleles and their subsequent use in various rice-breeding programs. Although the sequence information is now generated with ease, it is equally imperative to develop user-friendly informatics resources harbouring the information that could be made easily accessible to users with diverse research interest. Despite the availability of a plethora of informatics resources for cultivated rice varieties, very few are available for the wild relatives of rice. Nevertheless, with the unprecedented surge in exploratory genomics efforts of wild relatives of rice and concurrent advancement in the frontier areas of bioinformatics, it is foreseeable that the informatics resources for wild relatives of rice will rise too. These resources will definitely spur new avenues of research in rice biology and thus should ensure a stable global food supply.