Rice 2020: A call for an international coordinated effort in rice functional Genomics

We describe a call for an international coordinated effort in rice functional genomics in the form of a project named RICE2020. The mission of the project will be: to determine the function of every gene in the rice genome by the year 2020, to identify functional diversity of alleles for agriculturally useful genes from the primary gene pool of rice, and to apply the findings of functional genomics research to rice genetic improvement.