Dear Colleagues,
On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we are pleased to invite you to Chengdu, China to participate in the 22nd International Symposium on Rice Functional Genomics (ISRFG 2025), to be held on 14 - 18 (or 23 - 27) August, 2025. This conference will adhere to the theme of "Promoting Rice Science and Technology to Ensure Global Food Security", and share the latest progress of rice functional genomics and its profound impact on agricultural production.
Rice is one of the most important staple foods worldwide. It is feeding more than half of the world's population and occupying a crucial position in maintaining global food security. With the continuous growth of the global population and rapid expanding demand in food supply, rice will play an even more vital role in global food security, agricultural economic development, and ecological protection. However, the world is currently facing many challenges, such as global warming, intensified soil pollution, and frequent natural adversities such as pests and diseases. These challenges seriously restrict the safe production of rice, and therefore impose urgent need to promote global rice production to a new height through scientific and technological innovation.
The global research progress in rice science is advancing rapidly. Rice scientists worldwide are working together to make tremendous achievements across versatile rice research areas. For instance, joint efforts have interpreted the complete reference genome of rice, drew the super pan-genome map of the Oryza genus, deciphered the evolutionary traces of the rice genome, built a technical platform for rice functional research, revealed the genetic basis of rice growth and development and environmental adaptation, discovered a series of molecular regulatory theories for the formation of important agronomic traits, stress tolerance, disease resistance, and efficient nutrient utilization in rice, and cultivated a series of superior rice varieties. The continuous breakthroughs in the fundamental research of rice are leading the rapid development of crop science throughout the world, and bringing new dawn to agricultural production and human health.
Holding a solid aim at continuously promoting the development of rice research and application, China is moving forward hand in hand with the world. Renowned as "Oriental Magic Rice", the hybrid rice has spread from China to more than 70 countries, leading to a giant leap in rice production. China has also made remarkable achievements in rice gene editing technology, breeding of green super rice, and the promotion of whole-grain black and nutritious rice. The joint efforts through collaborative scientific and technological innovation have contributed to the rapid progress of rice genome functional study, and paved the way for resolving the possible food crisis that humanity may face in the future.
Looking forward to the future, the research prospects of rice functional genomics are broad. Under the trend of accelerating advancement of biotechnology and strong empowerment of artificial intelligence, greater and newer achievements will be realized in diverse aspects of rice fundamental research and practical application, covering the identification of hub genes governing rice agronomic traits, the dissection of coordinated regulation of different developmental processes or environmental adaptation, the mining of genomic variations and elite genetic alleles, the four-dimensional genomics and spatiotemporal dynamic gene regulation, the improvement and refinement of bioinformatics and database platforms. The continuously expanding and deepening research of rice functional genomics will surely foster and facilitate breeding rice varieties with superior traits such as high yield, high quality, stress tolerance, pest and disease resistance.
This year's conference venue, Chengdu, is located in the southwest of China and has been known as the "Land of Abundance" since ancient times, with a long history of more than 4,500 years. In recent years, Chengdu has continuously ranked at the top of China's happiest cities and has also been rated as the best tourist city in China by the World Tourism Organization. Chengdu has a strong agricultural scientific and technological strength, among which Sichuan Agricultural University is the core scientific and technological force for building the "Tianfu Granary".
We sincerely welcome you to come to Chengdu to join us in ISRFG 2025. Your attendance will help gather the wisdom and strength to provide new ideas, new strategies, and new tools for rice genetic improvement and breeding central to solving the global food security problem.
Promoting Rice Science and Technology to Ensure Global Food Security
