Abstract
Summary Plant breeders are responsible for impressive gains incrop productivity. More than 50% of the increasedworld food output over the past 50 years could be at-tributed to improved varieties. Recent advances inmolecular biology, such as engineering disease andinsect resistance genes, will augment work by plantbreeders and provide traits that previously did not ex-ist in the germplasm, for example, sheath blight re-sistance in rice (Lin et al. 1995). Population growthis continuing at more than 2% annually in many de-veloping rice growing countries. To feed this grow-ing population, the growth rate of rice productionneeds to be accelerated. Innovative breeding methodsand the emerging tools of molecular and genome bi-ology must supplement the conventional breedingmethods in achieving the future rice breeding goals.Biotechnological tools accelerate rice breeding andbroaden the rice gene pool. Transformation usingalien genes from bacteria, fungi, protozoan, insects,animals and plant species allow breeders to accom-347
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