Acceptance of new rice genotypes requires their ability to satisfy consumer preferences for premium grain quality, besides being high yielding. As rice consumers become increasingly particular about the quality of the rice, we need to ensure that modern varieties were less susceptible to breaking during milling and assure premium cooking quality with optimum texture, flavor, and aroma. Translating human health benefits by enhancing nutritional properties includes enriching micronutrients, ensuring food safety, and introducing slower digestibility factors. Recent advances made in introducing various high-throughput phenotyping methods to screen milling quality, cooking quality, and nutritional quality in the pool of breeding material are discussed in depth. This volume presents the relevant methods and detailed protocols with appropriate instructions outlined by experts to facilitate grain quality and nutritional screening in the germplasm. Detailed protocols to define seed development stages, panicle architectural traits to understand yield components, and measure physical traits such as grain dimensions using imaging techniques and chalk and head rice yield have been discussed in Chapters 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6. We need to link initial indicators of cooking quality (amylose, gel consistency, and gelatinization temperature) with texture and viscoelastic properties to capture distinct cooking quality classes. Also covered are biochemical methods that measure properties related to cooking such as starch structure and protein properties in Chapters 2, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Holistic understanding of grain quality traits by exploring metabolomics platforms to screen primary metabolites and volatiles has been described in Chapter 11. In addition, health and nutritional aspects need to be factored into rice breeding programs to contribute to the overall wellness of rice consumers. Therefore, we need to take into account breeding healthier target traits by capturing the diversity for low glycemic index and high-resistant starch and enriching nonstructural polysaccharides and micronutrients with acceptable cooking quality, texture, and palatability. Methods related to micronutrient profiling, screening heavy metals, and identifying rice cultivars with lower glycemic index have been addressed in Chapters 13–15. We need to establish the genetic basis of the variation of cooking and eating quality traits through genome-wide association studies by studying both diverse set of lines and pre-breeding core collection. Genome-wide -omics analyses have provided efficient approaches to identify key genomic regions that control grain quality traits. Knowledge of these genes and the influence of specific alleles present in both domesticated and wild rice gene pools provide a robust platform for marker-assisted selection in breeding to introgress premium grain quality traits in high-yielding backgrounds. Emphasis has been given to utilizing resequencing resources for the gene discovery programs via structural genomics, exploring transcriptome, epigenetics, and genome editing technologies to unravel grain quality, and nutritional traits have been discussed in Chapters 12 and 16–18. In summary, overall emphasis has been given to holistic understanding of grain quality traits covering various phenomics technologies and links it through to gene discovery via QTL cloning and structural-functional genomics strategies.

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