 This is indeed a very special, special seminar. It's going to be a seminar given by Dr. David Keele. And it's a special honor for me to introduce a fine colleague, as I was a good friend of mine, and I'm sure a good friend of many of you, yours. So I'm going to use probably no more than two minutes. For the last two weeks, David has been very nice to me, who, if I say bad things, or makes some inappropriate jokes in front of everybody. So I'm going to stick to the script here. So we asked Dave to write up his introduction slide. And then two days ago, if you want to talk to me, he said, this is it. So he came in a same slide, a simple form. What it really shows is he's a man of action, less words, when a few words. And you can see from the history that he, I just very quickly go down here, and he's currently our principal scientist. And he greys from UC Davis in genetics and agronomy. And then he started his career quite early at Erie, in fact. He did part of the work, you could say, but then at that time, I believe, is somewhat linked with Erie. And Erie became Erie's prime reader in 1982 and 1991. And then he left. He had a long sabbatical at UC Davis, at the ALS. At that time, it was a wave of returning scientists. And then I think Dave is one of them. In 2001, he came back to Erie, become the scientist and also the program leader and also a head of division. So only until recently that his workload just kept too much that he dropped the division head job and then Dr. Braw took over and then he remained the program leader. And his research interest is broad, if you can see at the bottom here. He was a range of law and rights reading program leader at one point. And his view of passion is about rights genetics. And you can tell that those of you who have been here long enough that after Dr. Cush left, he took over the rights genetics and policy every four years and five years. And he's been the Erie's icon for rights genetics. And you can see that he listed his interest here from the stamp of a bioregistress. And most recently, he's Mr. Submergence. That's what you want to know. Now, so this is his slide. So I thought, this is really not fair to have one single slide. This is an authorized slide. So trust me, I have to mobilize a whole division to look for this picture. That is, the criteria is with hair. So finally, I mean, you can tell him the pants, his belt ball and pants. All in sevens. So I just want to say one word. He is Mr. Humble. I mean, just his introduction slide for himself is so simple, but indeed he did a lot. And you can see that I just put up some of the achievements he has here. He received numerous awards. And he's elected fellows of several professional societies. So what I find a word is that they have all the attributes. As a good scientist, I always call him a modern breeder. So he didn't quarrel with those biotech or conventional breeders. He embodied both. So that's someone that we treasure a lot at Erie. That we will integrate everything and be able to reason with you, but not shouting at you. So he has this attribute of sitting in a room, listening and say a few words and get things done. So these are the kind of colleagues we value extremely. So finally, I'd like to say something, citing something you hear later on. I'd like to conclude saying that Dr. McHugh's leadership, wisdom and commitment to the application of right signs for development are what makes him one of the most highly respected individuals in the world of agricultural science. And this is a line not written by me, it's by my son, Kylin. So, Dave, follow yours. Well, thank you, Dave. It's true what he said that he made me behave very nice to him the last few weeks, but I don't know why he asked that. I always behave very nice to him. Anyway, I'd like to start by pointing out something on this slide that basically, as Hay mentioned, I had three jobs at Erie and at UC Davis, three main jobs. And what I'm going to try to do is give some idea of some of the things that not only that I did during this time, but also related to the things going on at Erie and the world of rice breeding. And in case you want to know how much time I spent in each of these jobs, it's there. So that gives you an idea of why I have to leave at this time. Now, I mentioned that my title, Stressed from a Rice, 35 Years of Progress. I picked 1975 for a few reasons, mainly because that's when I started my career on rice, really. But it's also a time that was of significance, I think, in Erie for what was going on here as well. And I'm going to do this like my thesis. So this is like a thesis of my work at Erie and I'll do it in chapters. So I have five chapters which represent different phases of the work on Stressed from a Rice, as well as my own involvement. So I'm starting from 75, and I have a picture of the Green Revolution. And I think that for people of my generation, the Green Revolution was a huge inspiration for us. So really to see what went on in places like Erie and Simit, and especially when it went on at Erie regarding rice, was really something amazing and something that all of us really looked at saying, wow, I want to do something like that because that was really great, being able to do something which affects so many people. So that inspired a lot of us to go into rice or to go into agricultural science. Now this is my hometown. So in 1975, I was here in San Diego. That's where I grew up. And this picture is taken more or less from where the University of California campus goes to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. And that here there is Scripps Institute of Oceanography. And in fact, just on the other side of that, right over around there, that's where I spent my young years in that water there. I was a surfer and I was spending a lot of time both on the waves and being submerged by the waves. And I was thinking, well, is there a career in this? And my answer was no, no career in this. So I got interested in agriculture and that's the time I moved to Davis, where the main campus which relates to agriculture in UC is. And this is a picture of my major professor, a neorector here. That's the H.P. Moon you may know him. Of course, you know. This was at the genetics symposium. But I met the neorector by chance because I was looking for a job and I wanted to find out what's going on with agriculture. And so I was walking around and somebody said, well, I think there's a job in the rice projects. So why don't you go check over there? And I went there and he said, well, I hired somebody already, but I'll think about it and see if I have money. So eventually he hired me as an undergraduate student and that was in 1975. So that's when I started working on rice. And one of the things he did which I still remember is he gave me, he said, here's a book. This book is the Bible of rice. It has everything you need to know about rice. He gave that book to me. That was the eerie annual report. And he said every time the annual report comes out, he reads it cover to cover. And he said that this is the best place to find out about what's going on with rice. So of course I got kind of inducted into what was going on at eerie. And very excited about the possibility of spending time and working on rice at eerie. And so another opportunity came by meeting some of the rice breeders like Ronnie Kaufman and Gurukush. And the chance to actually do my thesis work at eerie. So I went to eerie in 1978 to do my thesis work. So I just, given away how old I am, you all know. But I started doing my thesis work in 1978 under a fellowship by Rockefeller Foundation. And that's where I really got the excitement of the work on rice. Now at that time at eerie, this publication came out. Actually this came out in 1975. And this is one of the things I read when I went to eerie. I was also intrigued and really excited by this idea. What they're saying is that the Green Revolution by this time it only affected about one fourth of rice farmers. So because the one farmer who has a lot of rice and then there's a lot of other farmers who don't have much rice. So what about the other three? That's what they were asking. What happens to these farmers? And they called the fortunate quarters, this group of farmers and those who were farmers were still unfortunate. So they haven't had any benefit. And of course one of the main reasons was they have unfairable conditions for rice. They have stresses, all kinds of problems. So what about those three fourths? What do we do for them? Now just before that eerie has started this genetic evaluation and utilization program. And what this was was a large scale screening of germplasm. Evaluation of germplasm for all the kind of traits you could think of. And then identification of the best donors and then starting using those donors in crossing and so forth. So this was a very, this was in the time when you could basically get a lot of money to do anything at eerie. There was a lot of money coming in. And so they could do these large scale projects. They hired a ton of people and they started screening everything. And in fact we're still using the material that was identified during this GEU program. So it was a very nice way. And it got all the scientists involved. All the scientists were involved in breeding. It wasn't just breeders, it was everyone. Physiologists, pathologists, animals. Everybody was working on this to identify the best donors. There were other things going on. I'm not saying this was all that it was doing, but this was the effort on germplasm, a very coordinated program, and a very good one. One of the results, work of Ben Bravara and Arlene Masoretto to screen the germplasm for submergence tolerance. So of course that's going to be one of my main topics today on submergence tolerance. So I wanted to highlight that work that they did and they identified the main submergence tolerance donors that we still use, although we're using of course the genes mostly, but we still go back and use these varieties for various reasons. And in fact we haven't gotten everything out of them that we could get out of them. So we're still benefiting from this large screening program, the GEU screening program. And F-13 I have a picture there which is the main variety that was the source of the Sub-1 gene. Now at the same time, the breeders were starting to cross these varieties and transfer these traits. Although they didn't know, in many cases they didn't know anything about the genetics, but they started transferring these traits into the hyaline varieties. I actually knew the guy on the right as H.K. Mohanti, one of the Mohantis from RISA. And he was a breeder from OUAT and he made this cross with the F-13A because he was from the place where F-13A was identified. And that cross at the right at 1979 which he made was developed into a breeding line which was a semi-gwarf. It showed that the semi-gwarf gene could be combined with sub-urgence tolerance. And also another eerie breeder, Dirk Heron's members was working on that and I learned a lot from Kim. And eventually we developed this line which I'll mention a little bit later. But a lot of this very important work happened during this period of time mid to late 1970s. Now, as he mentioned already, I was hired by Eerie in 1982 as plant breeder. I have no idea why they hired me. But I have thinking about that, that they wanted me to work on brain cell load and rice and nobody else wanted to work on brain cell load and rice. So I got the job as the young guy who worked on brain cell load and rice. And generally, at that time, it was regarded as well, okay, when you're new, you can work on brain cell load and rice. If you get better or if you get promoted, you might get to the point where you can actually work on irrigated rice. So brain cell load and rice was considered a kind of a starting area. And then if you were good, you would graduate. In fact, our own DG became as the program leader for brain cell load and rice. He did such a fantastic job. They promoted you, right? So it shows you that this is the kind of the difficult environment. That's what we call difficult environments. I met a lot of breeders and they were working on brain cell load and rice. And they would go and say, yeah, what about drought and submersions? And they would say, yeah, drought and submersions. But I'm really interested in bacterial blight and garbage and even getting rice. Just because I was interested in drought and submersions, they hadn't talked to me about that. I was also pretty lonely. There wasn't any coordinated effort. There were other people who were interested in brain cell rice, but there was no kind of coordinated program on how to deal with the problems and I was kind of working on my own and it was easy to see that this was not a problem of just varieties. This was the whole system. The management and social aspects and everything. So I really felt like we would benefit by having a more coordinated effort on that and, of course, eventually that came about. Now at the time the two major things that I was looking at were drought problems and submersions. The two main abiotic stresses, which really defined the brain cell environments, the brain cell lowland environments. And I found drought problems work to be a bit frustrating. When I first came, they showed me these kind of pictures. I'm not sure if people will see that what I'm showing here, but this was the large scale screening which was part of the GU program on screening for drought problems and what they were doing was they would seed these in upland condition and then apply serious drought stress especially in the dry season and try to kill everything off. There were plants like this one that just stayed green and survived and then when you re-watered they would grow. So when I first came they were saying this is tremendous opportunity because you could see huge differences in genotypes. But then what I noticed is that there was a screening under this condition and then I would take it to the farmer's field this was a field test in North East Thailand at that time and what I found is that there was no connection between what happened here and what happened here. They were not related. So I don't think people want to hear that. They said well we have this drought screening program and it's being fantastic but if I say well the the material is coming from there they don't perform well What I can say is that we did in the end find some materials that were okay under drought tolerance and so I think there was some progress made some of the donor varieties that people have been using for genetics and other things came out of that project and this is one variety that was released in Laos it's a glutinous variety and I don't think it had much drought tolerance glutinous varieties developed there and became the most popular variety. So this came out of our breeding program in North East Thailand so at least there was something useful that came out of the work on drought in the case of submergence I think it was much more successful as you might expect because of having a major gene trait although we didn't know it was a sub-1 gene at that time but we did develop some breeding clients that performed very well under submergence this is the one I mentioned earlier R4830 R7 it was the first time to really combine high yield with submergence tolerance now here it's a little bit intermediate it's not as tolerant as the highest ones but when I left in the 1991 Dr. Suropong Sakurong came and took over that job and he did some further work and he found out that this one really had very good submergence tolerance so he used this widely in all the processes he made for submergence tolerance most of the processes he made and I wanted to mention the good work of two of the main staff I had at that time this was Modesto Amante and Goroa Complona they were working with me on rice now Modesto was working on the submergence project and the medium date project and Goroa was working on the drought project an interesting after I came back it was opposite now Modesto went to drought and Goroa went to submergence but that's the wrong story but one other variety that came out was this variety R468 which was actually released after I left here but Goroa was instrumental in that and that variety was actually released because of some drought tolerance in fact Arben was telling me it hasn't drought tolerance but it had very good submergence tolerance and in fact it wasn't appreciated but recently that R468 which we call IR 119 is one of the best varieties that we have for submergence tolerance and it has some moderate drought tolerance so there were some good things that came out of that project but in general I could say that there was a long way to go because there was nothing really that became very successful so I wanted to go to the next phase which I spent in Davis in California and I called it genetics which is what I started to do I started working more on genetics and like the markers and at this stage my graduate student I had a picture of my graduate student there he started working with me on looking at the submergence tolerance and we were able to identify this major PDL which we call Sub 1 and the Sub 1 gene turned out to be quite interesting because of such a strong effect in fact it basically is a major gene but it wasn't really much appreciated until we did the smatting work that it was a major gene and eventually of course the gene was cloned and I'd like to thank also of many people involved this is Pat Ronald at UC Davis with Kenone here for the transformation so they basically did the transformation work to confirm the effect of Sub 1 and a special thanks to Zebra who joined me at the time to try to finish this project and at the time it was great these were quite difficult but she helped a lot to really push it through to the conclusion and then of course Julia Benny Sirius and Abdul my colleagues so all of them were joining us to now this was designed by my daughter Bianca it's a picture of the Sub 1 gene in the form of a submarine a yellow submarine and it's a little bit of a cartoonish submarine but it also looks a little bit like a rice grain you can see that and we call it the submarine gene so Bianca gave me permission to use this in my slideshow and I think she would be amenable to license this so it could be something you might think about now in addition to submergence there were many other QTLs identified in fact I think in 1990s was kind of the decade of QTLs there were so many QTLs mapped and of course continued after that this was from a paper that I wrote with Henry Newman we have Sub 1 photography sensitivity and we have all these drought traits here and so we started thinking about how to use all these QTLs for breeding but there wasn't really a clear idea about how to use these QTLs at that time so I go to my fourth chapter which is after I returned to Erie called Release and Adoption so this is where we had made some rapid progress in breeding for submergence and other stresses I want to show a diagram which I used many times and this shows the process of back-crossing molecular arm-assisted back-crossing or marker-assisted back-crossing to introduce the Sub 1 gene into a particular variety in this case we use Swarna by using two back-crosses and we select here for a very small integration of Sub 1 so this idea was not really something that I invented it was actually described by Steve Thanksgiving as early as I think 1989 and so not many people used it though but I started to use that, Kenan and I started to use this procedure at UC Davis and we had a variety called M202 which is the dominant California variety so that's what I was working on at that time and it was successful to develop M202 Sub 1 however California was not interested in Sub 1 so that there was no really benefit because they don't have a problem of submergence but Julia very serious did go on and use the material with her postdoc Takeshi Fukawa to study the effects of the Sub 1 gene and to identify the mechanism and so forth so it was useful from a basic standpoint but and Davis is not a good place to do this kind of work and effort to do this so of course that was one of the things I was really interested in doing when I came back to Neary now I want to emphasize the reason the problem of leakage drag because I think it's not what I appreciated so I apologize for non-geneticism but I'll just talk a little bit about leakage drag which I think is a big problem with back crossing and this is a kind of a diagram of what happens during back crossing in terms of the percent donor genome so this so once you make an F1 this is about 50% right and then in each generation of back crossing it goes down by half so it goes down to that's average figure because you just keep diluting the donor genome now what happens with the non-carrier chromosomes the ones where you don't have the gene is not on those chromosomes it drops very rapidly in back crossing so by back cross cross 6 you don't have too many of those fragments left and then it declines rapidly after that you get hardly anything left on the non donor on the non-carrier chromosome on the carrier chromosome it's different it starts a little bit low because this one chromosome but it persists and the reason it persists is because you don't get enough recombination normally to make the fragments small and so you end up having big fragments size and one of my students actually measured this up through I think BC3 he found that the size of a fragment was about 15 megabases of DNA after 3 back crosses which was which is about half of a chromosome and it doesn't go down that fast so you end up transferring a lot of genes with the gene you're trying to introduce you're transferring a lot of the donor to it now this is Sefti everybody knows her and Sefti did a lot of work in my projects so I could put her picture on the slide but I'll put it here because this was made of her data what she looked at was microsatellite markers and we could probably do update this with the chip based markers but this was not with microsatellite so this is the FR-38 chromosome and all the FR-38 alieos are red and this is a breeding line IR-40931 it has some pink which means non FR-38 alieos and this is the IR-40830 which I mentioned earlier and this is my point for unfounded speculation which I think is a good place but I think the very third of December is a good place for saying this so I'm going to give my unfounded speculation that you look at this pretty breeding line in this side the subordinates at the top of the right chromosome so the chromosome goes way over here so this is just a part of it and it keeps going so obviously there was a recombination here in this line and so it got rid of the FR-38 part and it's something else and this was the first line which we had which was high-yielding and had good plant type many good traits from FR-38 so my speculation is that this part of the genome of FR-38 has genes which are not very good for high-yielding rice at least we can say and some of these early lines they still have this and as a result they're low yielding they have bonds, they have other problems it was only by chance of course an expert visual observation by the breeders that we got this recombination so this to me points out the importance of linkage drag when you're introducing genes from exotic varieties including germplasm that this is a problem this is a diagram made by Bert Collard and Bert Collard is by the way joining here in a couple months so he'll be taking over this work I'm very happy about that so Bert and I worked on this paper the three stages of marker assisted back crossing so we have three stages one is the selection of the party gene the second one is recombinant selection so you select for recombination on either side that means you look for the non-donor allele on either side and these markers are close to the gene they're usually around 3 to 5 stem organs apart from the gene the other allele means that you got recombination there and then after you do that you select for the background markers so the nice thing about these three steps is that in each step you minimize the amount of work for example you don't have to do a background selection on all these you only have to do the background selection here and by this time you've already removed most of the lines so it reduces your work and it makes a very fast recovery of the genes from the medical student also who work on this problem most people call these two as background selection but we change a little bit because we feel that this is actually different from there it's not really different from the procedure outlined by Steve Penckley and so we had a project from BMC Abdo and I had this BMC project that allowed us to produce six varieties and these are the six varieties that already is one of the varieties produced by that procedure and you can see the way they perform so they the performance is really night and day between these varieties and the originals next to them and the work was really very high quality in my opinion I want to thank the Bob, this is Bayne Rodriguez and who did the initial ones and Darlene Sanchez joined our project after Bayne left and the fact that we sent these seed out and we never heard anything about any problem no problem with segregation no problem with background raising so the work they did was really excellent very high quality and we have developed two new ones the most popular variety in Indonesia by one Indonesian scholars in the world and this one which Darlene produced RC-18 Sabwan and in initial testing they look really excellent here they perform really well and so they look promising and we hope this one could at least replace or either one replace the RC-4 Sabwan which is acceptable to Tungro but it looks very good in India so most of these varieties are in the process of release in fact these six I think by the end of this year nine of them will be released as varieties and the students disseminated and this one probably could also be released so it's pretty good success record of how to develop these kind of varieties you know normally with breeding from scratch you're lucky to get one out of a main release so this procedure is very conservative but you know it's a good way to get materials that you can put in the farmers field these are some of the other varieties that have been released with the Sabwan gene but not produced by Margaret since the back crossing so just as a subject of the Sabwan alliance they have about half sorry one into two tons yield advantage under some emergence but in extreme cases they could be more than three tons higher and in fact it could be the case of zero versus three or four tons so it's a big difference they're coming from about one week after seeding to budding stage so it's a wide range so far no negative effects of Sabwan gene and another benefit is that you avoid the transplanting cost and yield declines from replanting so if you've got submergence in the early stage then the farmers will replant the field and they have to go out and find seedlings or replant or whatever then there's a cost and there's yield reduction from replanting so this way you would avoid that if you have submergence a little bit later where it's too late for replanting then of course the benefit is even more and finally the very rapid upscaling so by bridal replacement these are mega varieties so they're widely accepted already by the farmers so it's very quick to actually scale them up for production so these are some of the benefits of the Sabwan varieties now unfortunately and of course I've been involved with all the major stresses drought and salinity as well as submergence and unfortunately for drought there's no like Sabwan gene that has the same effect on drought and it's unlikely that we would find that however there's been major progress on drought tolerance in the last 10 years and when I first came here in 2001 I still had some doubt how far can we go on drought tolerance and that was rapidly changed by the work that was going on earlier from Brigitte's time with Gary Atlan and Rene Lafitte and Arbent Group and they made great progress these are some of the varieties and this one is the Bagidan this variety has about one time yield advantage under drought but we're not talking about one time like 3 to 4 or 4 to 5 we're talking about 0.5 to 1.5 so that makes a huge difference to a poor farmer in a rain-fed environment so the Bagidan moves great promising and it's being promoted in the struts of projects and I think it's going to be covering a large area in addition to the breeding work of course you all know that there are some major QTLs for drought and those QTLs are being transferred into the make variety like this one so there's been huge progress on drought and salinity as the same there's been good varieties for inland salinity mainly developed by places like Carnar but with Erie's help and then these are two Erie varieties, released one in Bangladesh one in India, actually just not released yet but hopefully soon and they're doing well in the coastal saline areas in the dry season and they're spreading rapidly in addition of course you are all familiar with the work on salt haul and other QTLs that Arcay, Belen and Abdel have been working on so those things are going ahead as well and I think that they're all also looking at combining salt haul and salmone for wet season saline areas in the coastal areas and there's been a lot of progress on both drought and salinity in addition to those emergence but you know so emergence is a special case because salmone gene which we don't have for those other stresses okay so I'm in my last chapter now of my thesis and I'm going to just talk a little bit about further progress and I think we're just at the beginning of stress torn rice and so it's important that we don't lose our focus and think that okay we can relax now because we made the big things we're really at the beginning of the success and so it's really important to even I would say I would hope we can strengthen our effort to really carry these through to a larger scale successes so this is a short list of what I see as important opportunities for stress torn rice just some examples there are probably many that I didn't include more mega varieties can be converted to stress tolerance and we're starting to do that with collaborative projects now with national partners so that will be even better than if we can do it at here we can actually help the scientists in other countries to develop varieties in there that are adapted to their definition I think that would be even better higher levels of tolerance we can get higher levels of tolerance than we have now multiple stress tolerance so combining more than one stress because we know these are not isolated things combining stress tolerance with other traits like higher yields quality biotech stress is still a lot of work to be done in this area and then also way biostress so some of these like adverse soils and heat we still have not done enough and we can do more on those as well so I think these are some examples of some of the things that could be done to really take advantage of the work that has been done so far and in addition I think that the chance of success for all of these is very high so these are not risky kind of activities these things can be done as long as we have the effort to do it so that's a good thing I know when you look at potential impact in the future you can project that you probably get high impact if you can increase the yield potential then you can get definitely a high impact and that will cut across every environment but it's still you know the exact way to do that is still some question obviously we have to do it it's important as are C4 rice so C4 rice of course is going to take a long time and also risky but things that have this big potential impact then you can do that but you also need plenty of things to do which are less risky and these are less risky and they can have also impact so I think it's really important to think of them that way I'll give you an example from our work on stagnant flooding stagnant flooding is unrelated to they're not the same trade at all and in fact some of the summer just won't rise are not very good at all under stagnant flooding stagnant flooding means that you have a gradual flooding over a long period of time so usually the flooding is like one or two months or more and it goes up to 50 centimeters sometimes a little bit higher in fact deep water rice is an extreme example of stagnant flooding so the problem is in any particular place you could have both stagnant flooding and summer in stress so ideally we'd like to have tolerance to both of them but one of the best summer summer varieties now is one or some one is not very good under stagnant flooding and we always recommend to the farmers and that's officially put in all the literature that these varieties are not for the areas which have stagnant flooding so in those areas now we're starting to get some new breeding lines which have power plant heights one is quite short I think that's probably the main reason that it doesn't do well under stagnant flooding it's quite short and these varieties have intermediate height and they still have good agronomic traits so we're working on that strongly now this is some work on evaluation so you can see a field where we evaluate stagnant flooding and there's a lot of variation some of them the varieties are gone so this is stagnant flooding which occurs relatively rapidly so what we can do is we can actually manage the water level in these tanks and we put maximum stress on swarms of one so what you actually do is you keep the water above swarms of one and swarms of one doesn't elongate because it's submerged swarms so you can keep the water above it and eventually it just runs out of energy and it dies but some of these other lines do quite well and if you look at the field this is a superimposed the work on screening for the sub-1 gene so many of the sub-1 lines have done 40 but plus and no rise but you can find things like this okay very good in stagnant flooding problems as well as sub-1 gene so we think that we're giving a lot of progress on this after the stage of course it does not finish you may have something that looks really good but then when it's after flowering it blobs so it falls over in the flower or it may have a sterility problem so there's still other things we have to do and so I think there's a lot more work that has to be done on this but at least you could see from the slide that there's no really barrier to actually doing, to actually coming up with this kind of project so that's good and also thanks to Jerome, our new researcher and group of art technicians both in the field and the lab who have been doing the great work on this screening program now one thing that I think is quite interesting is making sequential upgrades we always talk about upgrading megabytes, it means adding sub-1 gene to Swarna or something else so basically it's kind of upgrading just like you buy new software when it has some new characteristics, it's still the same software but it has some new features so we find this upgrading of these megabytes and we can do this by introducing the major genes and the idea we have is okay once you make the first one then you want to add something else you want to add bacteria blight to Swarna sub-1 bacteria blight resistance so add the gene for that you want to add salt parts so add the gene for that and so forth so you can keep adding these genes this is an example I just mentioned and then how do you call these things that are upgraded you keep coming out with new ones, maybe every few years you come out with a new one and the timing is maybe that the naming system has to be adopted for example like software so we have Swarna 1.1 or maybe we have Swarna 2012 or something like this there will be a lot of these it could be confusing but I do think that this is a viable strategy and this is something that we've already started working on now I want to show the problem of this is right in relation to sequential operating of megabytes this is an example of your varieties of one which there was no recombinant selection so you ended up getting about a big piece of chromosome that was added that's about 10 to 15 megabases of chromosome and so basically you're 96% recovery of the current parents I personally am not very comfortable with 96% because that 4% could have many things in it so I'm a little bit concerned about that but many people are doing this because they don't want to there's too much work to do the recombinant selection so I'm not going to do it so they end up with that but if you go the whole way you end up with that so you get 99% that 4% doesn't make much difference and in fact some readers have told me well maybe you'll get something beneficial in the 4% so sure maybe, maybe you will so it depends on what you want but if you have too much difference keep in mind that if you have too much difference in your upgraded megabrighty then it's not an upgraded megabrighty it's a new variety it has to be considered completely as a new variety and you have to go through the whole process of evaluating that just like it was and completely new variety whereas with an upgraded megabrighty most countries are interested to get these as replacements of the original and they have an expedited process now let's imagine you have a sequentially upgraded megabrighty and you have 3 genes that you've added but you didn't want to do the recombinant selection so you end up with 91% recovery this is not the same variety this is completely different from a new variety 10% change I'm not saying that you can't do this you can do it and no problem but it's just not an upgraded variety so it's something that you keep in mind when you're doing this work it seems to me in my opinion it's worth the extra effort to get the completed upgraded variety in this case it makes a huge difference when you have 3 genes so that's the way that I would do it I think how far can we go how many genes can we add when you're adding like 1% for each gene then eventually you will end up with a different variety also probably with those linkages and that's one reason for isolating the genes then what you could do is you could actually replace the whole procedure with a transgenic procedure and you could add 4 or 5 genes in a single shot and that would be better so eventually we may run out of the potential for this upgraded variety but on the other hand most of these genes we still don't know which gene confers the traits so there's still got a bit of work to actually identify those genes and that's one I think that's a justification for why we really have to go ahead to try to identify the actual genes now my talk didn't cover all the aspects of stress tolerance and rice stress tolerance and rice and it didn't do justice to the whole story which involves a lot more than just reading developing the lines of course I wanted to focus on that because that was probably the main role that our group did but I've been involved of course with STRAS in program 1 there's a holistic way to look at solving the problem so once you have stress tolerance varieties they're acceptability by the farmers so for example I learned from Thelma that they really like swarming someone because it matches what they expect from the swarming and they're really happy with it and so that kind of feedback you need when you're dealing with this kind of environment you need to do C production in the past we just set up there's a variety somebody else will do the C production everything will happen so with STRAS we have a very good project on C production and we've been producing a huge amount of C and of course ERI is not producing the C it's done by the C companies by the NGOs by all kinds of agencies involved in C production but we have a coordinating role as Umesh likes to say a catalyst role in that there's information that has to go along with the C so you have books in the languages that have to be produced and we've been starting to get some involvement in that although of course it began as done by the national programs but we sometimes help them with the tags and so forth and then you have to optimize the management practices, all kinds of things so I may not have to put everything here but these are some of the major things you have to think about for the whole picture of how to achieve impact with STRAS corner varieties which would apply to all the STRASs in addition we need a coordination of these activities so we have projects like STRAS and network like Hue which help us with making a coordinated program to address all these issues so I think these have served us very well in that regard finally I'd like to just mention that I don't have a slide to mention everyone that I kind of cited in this talk but there's a lot of area scientists involved which I'm really thankful for their work especially in our STRASa project in the BMZ project and all kinds of projects scientists in the NARS as well in my research group also I've done and the degree and other people are working on some engines the program one ladies also who have helped us immensely to carry on many of these activities I think he was correct in pointing out in my first slide that I highlighted just very briefly some of the things I did but obviously being a division head and a program leader was a big job and one that I've many times felt inadequate to really do well but these people made it look very nice so I'm thankful for them for that work and it was very rewarding for me to be working on these things and last but not least my family and the family of my staff I'm really grateful for them for all their support and where am I going now where am I basically going to Mars not this Mars it's a food company Mars and I'm working for the food business which is Uncle Ben's Rice so if you haven't tried Uncle Ben's Rice I'm not saying to go out and try it it's mainly for it's a little bit expensive and it's mainly for Americans and Europeans but we do have a few other products which you might enjoy so probably you could stick to those products for the future if you want to use any Mars products and I'll be based here I'm really happy that the company has allowed me to be based in UC Davis so it's a kind of very nice opportunity for me it'll be my first chance working for a private company but at least I will also have a joint appointment in the university they have a very good relation with the university and so that I hope will give me a lot of opportunities for the collaboration with the work going on here at Erie so with that I'd like to thank you very much for your attention