Breeding Resilience: Exploring Lodging Resistance Mechanisms in Rice

Lodging is more than just plants falling over; it incurs significant economic losses for farmers leading to a decrease in both yield and quality of the final produce. Human management practices, such as dense sowing, excessive nitrogen fertilizer applications, inappropriate sowing dates, and upland rice cultivation, exacerbate the risk of lodging in rice. While breeders have developed high-yielding rice varieties utilizing the sd1 gene, relying solely on this gene is insufficient to enhance lodging resistance. Identifying the traits that contribute to lodging resistance is crucial. Key factors include biochemical, anatomical, and morphological traits, such as the levels of lignin, cellulose, hemicellulose, silicon, and potassium, along with the number and area of vascular bundles and the thickness, diameter, and length of the culm. Moreover, markers associated with lodging-related genes, like SCM2, SCM3, SCM4, and prl4, can be utilized effectively in marker-assisted backcrossing to develop rice varieties with desirable culm traits. This literature review aims to aid rice breeders in addressing the issue of lodging by examining traits that influence lodging resistance, developing phenotyping strategies for these traits, identifying suitable instrumentation, exploring methods for screening lodging-resistant plants, understanding the mathematical relationships involved, and considering molecular breeding aspects for pyramiding genes related to lodging.