Experts Recommend Climate-adaptive Breeding Pipeline for Rice

Yunnan Academy of Agriculture Sciences and partners released a review article on rice breeding, highlighting the urgent need to use modern tools to combat the climate crisis. The article is published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.

Their review is summarized in these key points:

• Extreme temperatures severely disrupt rice physiology, leading to reduced growth, lower yields, and poorer grain quality, which directly threatens global food security.
• The rice germplasm contains a wealth of valuable alleles that are essential for breeding temperature-resilient varieties.
• While classical hybridization and selection are foundational, they typically take 8–12 years to produce a new variety. This timeline is far too slow to keep pace with the rapid fluctuations of modern climate change.
• Advanced technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9, marker-assisted selection, and genomic selection provide the precision and speed needed to identify and integrate climate-resilient traits much faster than traditional methods.

The experts recommended a rice breeding pipeline that combines speed breeding with high-throughput phenotyping to significantly shorten the breeding cycle and more efficiently develop and deploy climate-adaptive rice.

Read the review article for more details.