Retrospective and perspective of rice breeding in China

Breeding is the art and science of selecting and changing crop traits for the benefit of human beings. For several decades, tremendous efforts have been made by Chinese scientists in rice breeding in improving grain yield, nutrition quality, and environmental performance, achieving substantial progress for global food security. Several generations of crop breeding technologies have been developed, for example, selection of better performance in the field among variants (conventional breeding), application of molecular markers for precise selection (molecular marker assisted breeding), and development of molecular design (molecular breeding by rational design). In this review, we briefly summarize the advances in conventional breeding, functional genomics for genes and networks in rice that regulate important agronomic traits, and molecular breeding in China with focuses on high yield, good quality, stress tolerance, and high nutrient-use efficiency. These findings have paved a new avenue for rational design of crops to develop ideal varieties with super performance and productivity.