Since green revolution in 1970s, representing by the ‘Tongil type’ rice cultivars, rice breeding has greatly contributed to the Korean society in terms of self-sufficiency in staple food-grains and development of agricultural industry. During last three decades, conventional rice breeding has successfully enhanced rice commercial value in Korea through developing elite cultivars related with high quality, resistant or tolerant against biotic or abiotic stresses, special-purpose, direct seedling, super yielding, and functional rice. In the meantime, breeding technologies has been also improved by adopting and putting to practical use of theories and technologies of plant science such as mutation breeding, cytoplasmic-genetic male sterility, anther culture mediated haploid breeding, marker assisted selection, and transformation. Rice breeding, meanwhile, is an endless procedure of creating desirable haplotype expressing improved performances of agronomic traits. Narrow genetic diversity of Korean commercial rice lines have been a major limit factor not only in developing breeding lines having resistance and tolerance against biotic and abiotic stresses, but also in expanding genetic availability in terms of widening end-use properties. Although introducing novel allele types might be possible via crosses with wild relatives, it demands additional tedious efforts to restore the unique genetic background of the recurrent parents, which determine commercial value in the market. Moreover, due to most conventional breeding programs are prone to depend on phenotypic selections, addressing the driving force to be a superior haplotype would be very difficult in terms of tagging the chromosomal location of the target loci and estimating their genetic effects. Recently, coupling with the decrease of domestic rice consumption, Korean rice industry has being threatened by rapid changes in environmental, social, and even international circumstances, for example climate change, aging population, and opening of the rice market. To maintain the rice industry as a stable and sustainable growth engine of Korean economy, it is strongly demanded to develop practical strategies encompassing wide variety of available resources including germplasm, bioscience, and manpower. As the role of R&D party, technology convergence followed by communication among stakeholders of rice research would be essential. To the context, based on the hypothesis of the future of Korean rice industry, major schemes related with the issues of 1) High Quality, 2) Cost Reduction, 3) Stable Production, and 4) Consumption Boost would be discussed along with the projections over the achievements and shortcomings of Korean rice cultivars in terms of agronomic traits.

Chili pepper (Capsicum annuum) is one of the most important vegetable crop for human being as a rich source of nutritions and spicy condiments. To make reference genome sequence of pepper, we sequenced the whole genome of Capsicum annuum, CM334 using Illumina/Solexa Genome Analyzer GA2. The genome size of CM334 is estimated as 3.5 Gb. A total of 716 Gb (205.96x coverages of the whole genome) of raw sequences were generated. After filtering out the low quality sequences, a total of 233 Gb (66.7x) of the raw sequences were used for assembly. Total assembled contig length and number were 2.93 Gb and 295,502, respectively. N50 and average length were 25.72 kb and 6,5 kb, respectively. By sequencial scaffolding with mate-pair sequences of 2 kb - 20 kb sizes, a total of 3.04 Gb of scaffold which is approximately 90% of the whole genome was assembled. The total number of scaffolds was 33,876 with N50 length of 1,605 kb. For annotation of the pepper genome, a total of 46 Gb of transcriptome sequences were generated from 12 different tissues using Illumina GA2 and Hi-seq 2000. We are under way of analyzing the characteristic traits of pepper using transcriptome data. The progress of pepper genome sequencing project including gene annotation, gene family analysis, comparative genomics studies on evolution of hot taste, genome expansion and fruit development will be presented in the meeting.

The objective of this study were to identify QTLs for agronomic traits using a set of introgression lines carrying wild rice (Oryza rufipogon) segment in cultivated rice (ssp. japonica cv. Hwaseongbyeo). Ninety-six ILs were evaluated for seven agronomic traits, amylose and protein contents. The proportion of the recurrent genome in ILs ranged from 87.8 to 100%, with an average of 96.7%. The mean number of homozygous and heterozygous donor segments were 2 (ranging 0-7) and 1.7 (ranging 0-6), respectively, and the majority of these segments had size less than 10 cM. A total of 22 quantitative trait loci were identified for 9 traits and each QTL explained 7.2% to 56.6% of the phenotypic variance. Some QTLs were clustered in a few chromosomal regions. A first cluster was located near RM527 on chromosome 6 with QTLs for culm length, panicle length, days to heading, 1000-grain weight and protein content. Three ILs with high spikelets per panicle compared to the recurrent parent were selected to detect and fine map the wild segments responsible for this variation. The results will be discussed.