ABSTRACT
Climate change is forcing rice breeders to accelerate the breeding process in order to develop varieties that are resistant to emerging biotic and abiotic stresses while also being nutritive. The genetic diversity available from traditional and wild relatives of rice serves as a basic genomic resource for breeding programs. With the application of new molecular tools, it is important to identify favorable alleles for major biotic and abiotic stresses and incorporate them into breeding programs. Allele mining is one such tool that should be utilized to its full potential for the identification of multiple favorable alleles for major economic traits in rice without compromising its quality or production. Approaches such as genome-wide association studies have made significant contributions to allele mining for a variety of traits in rice germplasm resources. Mining favorable haplotypes from diverse genetic resources and incorporating them into breeding lines can help achieve the maximum genetic gain in breeding programs. Combining the mined favorable alleles with novel mating designs will help breeding programs develop modern rice varieties with high production efficiency and stress resilience. On the other hand, modern selection tools like genomic selection approaches have significant scope for selecting new favorable alleles through genomic breeding values. In this chapter, we have discussed exploiting rice genetic diversity through allele mining for stress resilience and nutritional quality traits, with examples.
