Abstract
Rice has become a 'model plant' with tremendous genomics contributions, mainly by Japanese scientists in the past fifteen years. From March, 2003, sixteen young Japanese scientists in this field starts a working group to discuss about rice researches in the past, the current, and the future. In this paper, I would like to introduce our activity and propose a new concept,in which rice should not be a mere model plant, but should be considered as a 'model crop'. We would here call plant molecular biologists that we had better challenge to work more on important agronomical traits using rice, in addition to purely scientific and ready-to-go traits. We also argue that molecular biologists and breeders should work together more practically and try to establish meaningful collaborations to harvest substantial 'fruits' from rice genome researches.
