A team of international scientists gathered in the country to study the genetic diversity of rice that will help conserve it and at the same time find valuable genes that will improve rice production.

Philippine-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) said that by looking at what different types of rice have in common, their valuable genetic diversity can be used to breed new rice varieties that will provide the foundation for improving rice production in the future and securing global food supplies.

Recently published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) are the findings of the research team, which scrutinized the genomes of 20 different types of genetically diverse rice used in international breeding.

The research was done in collaboration with Colorado State University, Michigan State University, Perlegen Sciences, Inc., McGill University, the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society, and Cornell University with support from a consortium of institutions and donors including the Generation Challenge Program, and United States Department of Agriculture.

“We are hunting for snippets of DNA, called single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs, that distinguish the rice,” Dr. Ken McNally of IRRI said.

He said that the collection of SNPs that they have found is the most extensive in rice to date.

“If the rice types share a favorable trait, like drought tolerance, high yield, or even desirable cooking quality characteristics, they are likely to share similar SNPs contributing to that trait,” McNally pointed out.

IRRI explained that rice contains tens of thousands of genes, “so finding a successful way to hunt through them all is a major breakthrough.”

The institution maintains the International Rice Gene Bank containing over 109,000 types of rice, yet relatively few have been used in breeding programs.

IRRI director-general Dr. Robert Zeigler said, “if breeders know more about the genetic makeup of rice, they can use it more effectively. As we face more erratic changes in climate, we will increasingly rely on using the untapped diversity of rice to develop new and improved rice varieties.”

Dr. Jan Leach, university professor at Colorado State University and co-author of the study, indicates that “the comprehensive SNP information is enabling exploration of rice diversity for understanding how genes function in rice and for improving important rice traits.”