The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship (within a duration of 27 months) by Dr. Michael J. Thomson to work with Dr. Sugiono Moeljopawiro at the Research Institute for Agricultural Biotechnology and Genetics Resources in Bogor, Indonesia.
This project will test a strategy for allele mining in rice using a combination of candidate gene analysis and linkage disequilibrium mapping. The PI will select a diverse set of wild rice accessions (representing natural selection), traditional landraces (representing moderate levels of human selection), and cultivated varieties of rice (under intense human selection since the Green Revolution) from Indonesia and elsewhere. A total of 220 accessions will be chosen to represent a broad range of genetic diversity, many of which are predicted to contain trait-improving alleles for disease resistance, which is the focus of the current study, as well as for other traits of agronomic importance. The ultimate objective is to efficiently identify beneficial alleles within the diverse germplasm accessions from Indonesia for future applications in crop improvement. This project addresses several topics of biological significance, including the evolution, domestication, and effect of modern plant breeding activities on the genetic structure of rice cultivars. Crop improvement requires a wide range of genetic diversity to provide sources of variation for disease resistance and other important traits.
