Summary

This project aims to use recently established protocols for assessing cold tolerance in rice for accelerated breeding of adapted germplasm which will confer a 3 – 7 ºC improvement in cold tolerance. No less important is the objective of ensuring that cold tolerance is introgressed in backgrounds amenable to the obtainment of higher levels of cold tolerance in the 6 different quality classes of rice currently commercial grown. A further role, and one pivotal to achieving levels of cold tolerance necessary for water saving, will be to investigate associated gene/s or variation in gene expression exhibit in tolerant germplasm or that in novel genotypes.

Program

Rice

Research Organisation

The Crown in right of the State of NSW acting through the Department of Primary Industries

Objective Summary

The project aims to use the recently developed cold air and cold water screening to accelerate the introgression of cold-tolerance genes into adapted backgrounds and to advance the most promising selected lines for yield and quality testing within the NSW DPI Rice Breeding Program. A second area of interest is to test the hypothesis whether marker-aided selection could accelerate introgression of cold tolerance in comparison to the conventional cold screening approach.

The scope of the objectives also includes improving the cold-tolerance levels for each of the 6 quality classes currently grown commercially, to improve on-farm profitability and enable the NSW Rice Industry to service existing and potential markets with a greater reliability. The long-term aim of the project is the attainment of a level of cold tolerance sufficient to allow the adoption of alternate irrigation strategies which would greatly improve the environmental sustainability of rice production in NSW. As this level of cold tolerance does not currently exist in current germplasm present in Australia, the potential of novel genotypes developed in Australia and overseas will be investigated as possible donor material to achieve this long-term aim.