Latin American Rice Breeding Gets a Boost from Genomic Tools
Published:22 Nov.2021 Source:University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences
How do you like your rice? Sticky, fluffy, brown, or white? These qualities, in addition to grain length, width, appearance, and other traits, are hugely important predictors of rice sales and consumption worldwide. And region matters. Rice preferences in Latin America, for example, are very different from those in West Africa, Japan, India, and elsewhere.
Given the importance of eating quality and regional preference, it's somewhat surprising how little time rice breeders spend improving and refining these traits. But it's expensive and time consuming to test and select lines based on how sticky the grain is after cooking or how long it takes to cook. And breeders have other important traits to think about, like yield and disease resistance.