Transitioning the world’s largest rice genebank (IRG) into an AI-powered next gen genebank

The International Rice Genebank (IRG), the world’s largest rice genebank, holds in trust over 132,000 varieties of rice originating from 132 countries. This rich resource is used for breeding to develop new climate-smart rice varieties. However, IRG is under-utilized: only 5% is used due to limited information on its collections, as we lack appropriate cost-effective and high-throughput phenotyping methodologies. The utilization of IRG has to be fast-tracked to sustain and increase rice production in the face of climate change.