BACKGROUND China has been successful in breeding hybrid rice strains, but is now facing challenges to develop new hybrids with high-yielding potential, better grain quality, and tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses. This paper reviews the most significant advances in hybrid rice breeding in China, and presents a recent study on fine-mapping quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for yield traits. ...

Using DNA markers in plant breeding with marker-assisted selection (MAS) could greatly improve the precision and efficiency of selection, leading to the accelerated development of new crop varieties. The numerous examples of MAS in rice have prompted many breeding institutes to establish molecular breeding labs. The last decade has produced an enormous amount of genomics research in rice, inclu...

Estimation of genetic diversity is an important factor in germplasm conservation and characterization. In rice breeding programs, genetic diversity information on specific regions of genome can be very useful for the application of marker assisted selection (MAS) and for gene mapping. A total of 152 rice lines were considered for breeding programs using microsatellites (SSR) technique. The tota...

Among the abiotic stresses, drought is a serious limiting factor that reduces rice production and yield stability in rainfed ecosystems. Conventional breeding for drought resistance is slow in attaining progress due to poor understanding of genetic control of drought resistance. Molecular markers help in identification of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with drought resistance traits ...

Grain appearance quality and milling quality are the main determinants of market value of rice. Breeding for improved grain quality is a major objective of rice breeding worldwide. Identification of genes/QTL controlling quality traits is the prerequisite for increasing breeding efficiency through marker-assisted selection. Here, we reported a genome-wide association study in indica rice to ide...

in order to study the effects of four concentrations (check, 5, 10 and 15%) of hull extracts on growth of 10 iranian rice cultivars, two experiments were conducted in completely randomized block design with factorial arrangement and three replications at two sites, laboratory and greenhouse. laboratory study showed that same rice hull extracts had stimulat effects and the others had inhibitory ...

despite the importance of drought stress in early stage of growth and plant establishment, it has usually been neglected as selection criteria in breeding programs. therefore, a population of recombinant inbred line derived from the cross “babax/seri m82” and their two parents were studied. the experiment was conducted in two randomized complete block designs with two replications under osmotic...

Breeding by design has been an aspiration of researchers in the plant sciences for a decade. With the rapid development of genomics-based genotyping platforms and available of hundreds of functional genes/alleles in related to important traits, however, it may now be possible to turn this enduring ambition into a practical reality. Rice has a relatively simple genome comparing to other crops, a...