**8. Outstanding elite hybrid rice varieties in India**

In India many verities of rice have been released by Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) institute, state agricultural universities and private seed companies.

#### **9. Future trends in rice breeding**

Rice production would have to double by 2050 to keep up with population growth. If the world's population grows, so will consumers demands for higherquality rice. In addition to this challenge, climate change is combining new biotic and abiotic stresses. As a result, when designing new lines, rice breeders must consider a large number of simple and quantitative traits in combination while preserving and enhancing grain quality. MAS has been effective in improving certain biotic, abiotic and quality traits in rice, but it is purposeful on broad impact QTLs/genes and ignores epistatic and genetic context effects. Most traits of interest to rice breeders are regulated by a combination of several small effect and/or major genes rather than a few large-effect genes. The use of genomic selection (GS) as an alternative to traditional MAS has been proposed. By the benefits per selection per unit time, GS has a huge potential to improve breeding efficiency. GS breeding enables breeders to use genome-wide DNA marker data to choose the most suitable parents for the next generation. The association between genome-wide markers and phenotypes of the individuals under selection is used to choose these parents. The major benefits of GS over MAS is that genotyping is not limited to a subset of markers that target genes with significant effects, but instead uses all available marker data to predict breeding value. This aids in the prevention of data loss. Genes with a minor effect can be tracked and chosen based on all of the markers results. As the cost of genotyping decreases, GS will become more efficient method for improving rice breeding performance [48, 49].
