**Author details**

*Recent Advances in Rice Research*

of studying root architectural traits has been emphasized for the adaptation of the crop varieties to various abiotic stress conditions. Genotypic variation has a significant role in adapting the adverse environmental and edaphic effects [14]. Inter- and intra-species variations in root architectural traits are very useful to breed the crops

Understanding and improvement of root system and its genetics plays a pivotal

Future exploration of stress responses regulated by roots at cellular or tissue level

will open the door of further breeding research. Besides the modern gene pools, exploration of genes and alleles in wild relatives and landraces will also provide interesting features that will be easier to transfer to cultivated rice. Further it is important to have a better understanding on the epigenetic regulation of roots and root development under stressful conditions. There will be a need for high throughput phenotyping systems coupled with automated data analysis for accelerating the development. Endorsement of approaches including both root ideotype-based screening and selection for grain yield may establish a fruitful screening system. Alongside designing new genetic screening methods based on a better knowledge of the integrated stress responses will be also appreciated. Dynamic root/soil interaction modeling will aid in integrating different functional parameters (e.g. water uptake per length of root) under a variety of environmental conditions. Overall the root system being less accessible and more complex than other agronomic traits, achieving the ambitious goal of future rice root research, coordinated effort and joint resources are required. The sensible and appropriate efforts will have a crucial role to play in future crop production in vulnerable climate and resource scarcity prioritizing the objective of

role to become self-sufficient and to achieve sustainability in rice production. Actually more yields from the limited input rely on our capability to unambiguously manipulate the plants. And exploring the diversity of root architecture both in genetic and phenotypic basis will directly connect to this concern. Although great strides have been made to understand the root morphology but in future, more intense investigations to elucidate the functional implication of root morphological variation may aid in selection of root system with anticipated characteristics.

for root features optimum for diverse environmental conditions [134–136]. Root anatomical and morphological traits have been well studied in rice [92]. Varietal differences in root morphological characteristics such as length and thickness have been reported in cultivated rice (*Oryza sativa* L.) in various studies [11, 14, 41, 137]. In general, the roots of upland rice cultivars are thicker and penetrate more deeply into the soil than those of lowland cultivars [14]. Root distribution has also been quantitatively characterized by using several traits, including root length, volume, and density in the soil at different depths, and

these characteristics differed among cultivars [92, 138–140].

serving food to 9 billion world populations by the year 2050.

"The authors declare no conflict of interest."

**3. Future prospects of rice root study**

**168**

**Conflict of interest**

Afsana Hannan1 , Md. Najmol Hoque2 , Lutful Hassan1 and Arif Hasan Khan Robin1 \*

1 Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh, Bangladesh

2 Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Khulna Agricultural University, Khulna, Bangladesh

\*Address all correspondence to: gpb21bau@bau.edu.bd

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
