Welcome to the Purdue Ionomics Information Management System, home of the Rice Ionomics project.

Rice provides the major source of nutrition for a large proportion of the world's population. Mineral nutrients such as Ca, Fe, and Zn play critical roles in human health, with over 3 billion people suffering from Fe and Zn deficiencies. Unfortunately for those who rely on rice for subsistence, rice grain is not a good source of these nutrients and can also contain toxic elements such as As and Cd. As such, alterations in the mineral content of rice grain to either increase or decrease levels of various elements would impact human health. In this National Science Foundation Plant Genome Research program funded project a core set of rice accessions selected from the USDA National Small Grains Collection (NSGC) (1,790 accessions) are being screened using ICP-MS for variation in accumulation of various elements including Mg, P, S, K, Ca, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Rb, Sr, Mo, and Cd. We are also screening rice grain from the genotyped Lemont x TeQing (F16) RIL population which our preliminary studies have already shown to be segregating QTLs for a number of important elements including Fe and Zn. The availability of TeQing-into-Lemont introgression lines (TILs) are being used for finer mapping of these QTLs. The integration of high-throughput phenotyping and genotyping will allow the rapid identification of genes and linked markers for application to breeding and transgenic improvements in the mineral nutrient content of rice grain.