Novel Transgenic Sources of Genetic Variation for Rice Improvement

The large numbers of people who depend on rice make it one of the world's most important crops.  Given the huge number of environments where rice is grown and all the challenges in raising, sustainable, high yielding crops there will always be needs to make improvements to the crop.  Plant improvement through plant breeding depends on genetic variation.  Rice breeders have enormous variation available to them but the genetic basis of the desired traits is complex and therefore the means of improving them is logistically complex and costly.  The isolation and testing of individual genes as transgenes has opened up the opportunities for finding single genes that affect specific traits and the means of deploying them in breeding programs.  These approaches offer the opportunity to add genes not present in the species but also to supply dominant genes that lead to trait improvements that are simply inherited and therefore easy to manage in breeding program.  Examples will be presented of genes that have been selected as being useful for incorporation into rice breeding programs to improve key traits.