As populations grow and cities expand, rice farmers across Africa are being asked to produce more on less land, while salinity, drought, heat and disease keep getting harder to manage and made worse by climate change. Many of the answers already exist in genebanks and in research literature, in the form of single genes or QTLs that help the rice plant withstand many biotic and abiotic stresses or improve its grain quality. The difficulty is that most of these genes never reach the varieties that farmers actually grow. They sit in traditional donors whose direct use in breeding programs could introduce hybridization barriers or linkage drag both of which lengthens the breeding cycle.
This talk shows how AfricaRice is closing that gap through marker-assisted pre-breeding. With breeders as end users, the pre-breeding output is focused on producing elite parental lines enriched with traits defined by the target product profiles. This talk touches on strategies and workflows involved in the planning of population sizes and selecting lines for advancement. It then looks more closely at the deployment of rice yellow mottle virus resistance into selected genetic backgrounds and presents preliminary results from screening for resistance to the African rice gall midge, an insect pest, and briefly recalls earlier work on salinity tolerance.
The take-home message is that valuable genes alone are not enough. Careful scoping/identification, validation and deployment of such genes/QTLs within well-designed breeding programmes are what turn genetic resources into better varieties and meaningful impact for African agriculture.
