Rice cold tolerance for yield stability and water-use efficiency

New South Wales Department of Industry and Investment for and on behalf of the State of NSW - Inactive

  • Project code: PRJ-000493

  • Project stage: Closed

  • Project start date: Friday, July 1, 2005

  • Project completion date: Tuesday, September 30, 2008

  • National Priority: RIC-Optimised genetic improvement

Summary

The occurrence of low night temperatures during reproductive development is one of the factors most limiting rice yields in southern Australia. The absence of cold tolerant rice varieties has resulted in the failure of grower adoption of water saving techniques, stagnating further improvements in water productivity of rice based farming systems.

This project was conceived to bolster stock of cold tolerant material that could be utilised by the NSW DPI Rice Improvement Program for the production of future cold tolerant varieties. The research will fine-tune methodologies and revaluate germplasm utilised in previous cold tolerance research into protocols to be both relevant and practical to service the needs of a breeding program striving to improve water productivity of future varieties.

The project will report on three years of cold tolerant evaluation, gemrplasm enhancement, germplasm delivery and cold tolerance benchmarking, activities never before undertaken on this scale in conjunction with the Australian rice breeding program.

Program

Rice

Research Organisation

New South Wales Department of Industry and Investment for and on behalf of the State of NSW – Inactive

Objective Summary

To use recently established protocols for assessing cold tolerance in rice for accelerated breeding of adapted germplasm which will confer a 3-7 degree C improvement in cold tolerance. To ensure 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 commercially grown. To investigate associated gene/s or variation in gene expression exhibit in tolerant germplasm or that in novel genotypes.