Unlocking the potential of wild rice to bring the missing nutrition to elite grains

Domestication and artificial selection of rice have allowed profound genetic changes to render wild rice more amenable for cultivation and consumption. As a result, the population has utilized rice massively as a caloric source to address hunger without taking into consideration its total nutritional value. In this review, we highlight how rice starch quality and other nutritional traits such as flavonoid, protein, and lipid contents were altered during domestication, while taking into consideration rice digestibility and textural aspects. A precise genetic alteration through transgenic technology holds significant promise to introduce the key genes involved in the synthesis of the missing nutrition that cultivated rice has lost. Although there is currently little concrete proof that genome editing has improved wild rice, the novel idea to de novo domesticate wild rice to retain their multi-nutritional properties while improving the agronomic yield and grain quality remains to be tested. We posit that the advent of deploying speed breeding techniques to introgress wild rice segments containing nutritious traits into elite pools can accelerate the future roadmap for using wild rice to improve human health.