Drought Frontier Project/International Rice Research Institute

The Frontier Project on Drought Resistance in Rice aims to harness recent scientific breakthroughs in breeding and biotechnology and the wide genetic diversity in rice to develop and deliver improved drought-resistant rice varieties through the following strategies:

• Explore rice genetic diversity and identify donors and parental lines for DR breeding.
• Identify key traits and mechanisms affecting rice DR and develop relevant screening techniques.
• Tag alleles that increase rice productivity under drought for marker-aided breeding, validate these in farmers’ fields, and use them widely in breeding programs of national research and extension systems (NARES) in different countries.
• Deploy gene transformation systems to identify and exploit DR genes in plant breeding.
• Develop improved rice varieties and hybrids that can double yield under drought relative to current widely grown varieties without constraining productivity in favorable years.