Perception of Advanced Techniques in Conservation and Utilization of Wild Genetic Resources of Rice

Breeders need access to unique genetic variability to meet the growing demand for food while maintaining sustainable agricultural production with the impacts of climate change for generating high-quality nutritional food. Changes in climate and anthropogenic activities and a multitude of environmental influences pose severe threats to food supply and preservation of natural diversity. For example, unpredictable droughts, elevated temperature, and new diseases and pests threaten crop production. Thus, breeding with crop wild relatives (CWR) gives significant resilience to modern agricultural systems and the ability to help sustainably boosting agricultural productivity. As a result, numerous genotype screenings are necessary for broad adaptability, producing a segregating material through fast breeding or rapid generation to shorten the breeding cycle and improving genetic gain. In addition, CWR genomics generates data that support CWR’s usage to boost agricultural genetic diversity. QTL mapping, identifying of candidate genes by next-generation sequencing, gene-based marker development, or significant candidate gene pyramiding of stress-responsive loci in popular cultivar are required to maintain the sustainability of crop production. Thus, genomic data is useful for identifying and isolating novel and dominant alleles of genes from crop gene pools that are agronomically important, which can be used to generate improved crop cultivars. Hence, the natural allelic difference in candidate genes that influences major agronomic characteristics and crop development initiatives is being investigated via allele mining. Among the CWRs of economically important crops, the wild species of rice is essential to improve modern rice cultivars. The awareness of novel genetic and genomic approaches of rice genetic resources for efficient utilization is crucial. Further, their conservation status and availability have not been quantified globally. As a result, a joint effort is required to improve the conservation and accessibility of crop wild relatives for rice breeding.