On November 9th, the China National Rice Research Institute (CNRRI) initiated the program of rice genetics and breeding, a program supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).

Dr. QIAN Qian, the chief scientist for this program explained after the news briefing that, based on germplasm innovation, combination of genotype improvement and phenotype identification, rice molecular design breeding has become an effective way to break through the bottleneck of traditional breeding. This program would mainly focus on rice germplasm innovation, super rice breeding and rice quality improvement. The purpose of this program is to establish the theory of super rice molecular design breeding in order to design new super rice with high yield potentials through the comprehensive utilization of genotype-phenotype database.