Anther Culture as a Supplementary Tool for Rice Breeding

There is a timely need to harness biotechnology and related tools to support conven- tional breeding strategies, overcoming the limitations in rice production and improving quantity and quality as well as climatic and disease stress tolerance of the crop. Anther culture allows immediate fixation of homozygosity through diploidization of regener ated haploid plants and therefore serves as an efficient path for inbred line development. Anther culture has been successfully used to hasten the breeding programs in several crop species including rice. However, associated constraints still prevent the realization of its full potential. Even though anther culture technique has been effective for Japonica rice breeding, applicability for Indica rice remains limited mainly due to inherent recal- citrant genetic background. Constraints associated with Indica rice can be identified as early anther necrosis, poor callus induction and proliferation, extremely low green plant regeneration and frequent albinism. Success of androgenesis is determined by factors such as genotype, physiological status of donor plant, pollen development stage at cul- ture, composition and physical status of culture media, culture incubation conditions and anther pretreatments. This chapter has detailed out the scope for improving the applicability of anther culture technique on rice in order to develop it as a supplementary breeding tool. include high temperature and chilling, high humidity, water stress, anaerobic treatment, cen-trifugation, sucrose and nitrogen starvation, ethanol, γ-irradiation, use of microtubule dis ruptive agents, electrostimulation, high medium pH, and heavy metal treatment.