November 4, 2022
As part of the efforts to further strengthen IRRI’s breeding team and mission, the Rice Breeding Innovations (RBI) Platform Leadership Team convened to map out strategies for native trait deployment on September 29.
Drs. Damien Platten and Amelia Henry led the discussion on the status of governance mechanism of native trait discovery, development, and deployment. The group discussed a strategy of organizing teams responsible for each trait to carry out the activities in the context of the Trait Development Pipeline. The concept of a “Trait Champion” to monitor the status of each trait was introduced.
The importance of trait prioritization and governance were also discussed. The Trait Development Pipeline is organized into six stages that link a variety of research disciplines, and the pipeline provides a structure that gives a framework for teamwork between these areas.
The Trait Development Pipeline offers recommendations for prioritizing characteristics, improving marker quality measures, defining criteria for phenotyping methods, and introgressing and verifying traits/genes/QTLs into elite genetic backgrounds to generate "elite donor lines" for use in breeding.
Ajay Kohli, Deputy Director General for Research, provided guidance during the meeting and emphasized the importance of prioritizing RBI’s flagship projects such as the low glycemic index rice, direct-seeded rice and climate-resistant varieties and the urgency to deliver the outputs of these projects in the next three years.
In closing, Hans Bhardwaj, Platform Leader, said,“ We had some very objective and productive discussions. The native traits vision and strategy we laid out, discussed and agreed to once fully developed, implemented and integrated into the OneRice breeding strategy will make us a very strong and mission driven plant breeding organization.
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