As a member of the Graminae and a crop plant, a wealth of fundamental information about important aspects of plant biology can be learned from the genomic sequence of rice. Rice is a model for learning about yield, hybrid vigor, single and multigenic disease resistance. Different races of rice are adapted to a wide variety of environmental situations, from tropical flooding to temperate dry land, so it is a model for real life adaptive responses. Because it shares collinear genomes, rice is a key to knowledge of the genomic organization of the other grasses. Comparison of the sequence of the dicot, Arabidopsis thaliana , with that of rice, a model monocot, will tell us what genomic structures these two different groups of angiosperms have in common and how they differ.
Rice is the principal food of half of the world's population.
Over the last 30 years there have been great strides in rice production, but the combination of greater world demand for rice coupled with less land and water inputs puts even greater pressure on us to improve rice production. The complete genome sequence will provide the ultimate genetic map in combination with the application of functional genomics tools will tell us where all of genes are and what they do. In the near future a plant breeder will map a trait to a chromosomal region and then go to the database to find the likely candidate gene. Not only does this provide the ultimate genetic marker, it allows the breeder to look at other germplasms for new and potentially better alleles. The function and map location of cereal and ultimately all plant genes.