Location: Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center
Project Number: 6028-21000-012-013-R
Project Type: Reimbursable Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Apr 1, 2023
End Date: Mar 31, 2027
Objective:
1. Design novel rice genotypes for yield and quality under stress environments.
2. Develop and optimize management practices to minimize use of water, chemicals, fertilizers, and energy.
3. Assess the socio-economic and environmental factors to facilitate adoption of production practices to mitigate the impact of climate change.
4. Implement an innovative educational and Extension programming to support and advance the sustainable rice farming system.
Approach:
For sustainable and profitable rice production in southern U.S., there is a critical need for developing new germplasm that can thrive under limited irrigation (i.e., severe alternate wetting and dry, AWD) and high day/night temperatures during flowering and grain filling stages. To accomplish this goal utilizing new technologies such as crop modeling, genomics, high-throughput phenotyping can assist in discovery of new genetic markers and allelic combinations in novel pre-breeding lines. This project involves diverse expertise with one overarching goal: maximizing rice yield and grain quality with minimum use of natural resources such as water and land under climate change. This goal is very complex especially under climate change due to various stresses such as limited water, pests, heat, increasing levels of CO2. In this project, the USDA-ARS, DBNRRC is focused on studying two stresses: limited water- and heat- stress and will evaluate two sets of mapping populations (Mermentau x N-22, and Dular x Cocodrie; developed by LSU) in field and take measurements on several traits such as: phenological traits, yield components and will identify novel germplasm, and molecular markers associated with the stress tolerance. Novel germplasms, molecular markers, beneficial alleles, genes/QTLs controlling key traits for adapting in stress environments will be identified and validated. Breeder-friendly molecular markers linked to the target traits under stress environment will be developed to assist rice breeding and marker-assisted breeding programs focused on sustainability and mitigating stress effect under climate change. The molecular genetic basis of the climate-resilient phenotypes will also be deciphered using genomics, transcriptomics, and physiological tools.
