The development of rice functional genome: variety design breeding.

Rice is an important food crop and is the staple food of more than 60% of the population of our country.
under the dual pressure of food crisis and people's living standards, breeders and rice farmers have long been committed to cultivating new varieties of "high-yielding and high-quality" super rice, but traditional breeding has been slow.
With the development of rice functional genome, "variety design breeding" has come into being, one of its important contents is to efficiently aggregate the excellent alleles of key genes of important agro-artistic features to form super-new varieties.
, however, the design of the most optimized breeding strategy in the breeding implementation of varieties is challenged, especially for the comprehensive improvement of high-yielding high-quality complexity, so far no concept-to-product coverage has been achieved.
the yield and quality of rice are complex quantitative characters, and so far, hundreds of quantitative character genes (QTL) or genes associated with rice yield have been identified.
previous studies have shown that the quality of rice cooking is mainly regulated by a genetic network of starch synthesis-related genes (PNAS, 2009).
On this basis, Li Jiayang Research Group of the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with the Qian Qian Research Group of the Rice Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Shenzhen Agricultural Genome Institute, has been carefully designed to take the ultra-high-yielding but poor-quality variety "Teqing" as a subject, and to steam and look the varieties "Japanese Qing" and "93-11 with good characteristics of cooking and appearance quality." "For the supply, the 28 target genes involved in rice yield, rice appearance quality, cooking taste quality and ecological adaptability were optimized combination, after more than 8 years of efforts, the use of hybridization, re-intersection and molecular marker orientation selection and other technologies, the high-quality target gene of excellent allied polymerization to the subject material, and fully retain the "special green" high-yield characteristics.
these excellent "variety design" materials, on the basis of high yield, rice appearance quality, cooking taste quality, taste and flavor have been significantly improved, and the hybrid rice quality of its distribution group has also been significantly improved.
results of this study will greatly promote the transition from traditional crop breeding to efficient, precise and targeted molecular design breeding.
The findings were published online March 20 in Nature Plants,DOI:10.1038/nplants.2017.31), and researchers at the Rice Institute of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences zeng Andi Tian Zhixi, a researcher at the Institute of Genetic Development of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, are co-authors, Qian Qian and Li Jiayang are co-authors.
the research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the pilot project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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