Essentially, there's two kinds of rice plants I'm working with. Cultivars and Weedy rice. Cultivars are stuff you eat for a meal, jasmine, basmati rice etc. Weedy rice however, although providing nutrition similar to cultivated rice; aren't feasible for farmers to grow in abundance.
This is because they have unfavorable traits such as seed shattering, which means the seeds fall to the ground before farmers can harvest them. Additionally, weedy rice also competes for resources with cultivated rice in rice paddy fields; causing loss in yield in the long run. It is extremely difficult to distinguish between weedy and cultivated rice since they share many phenotypic traits.
What's interesting is, the reason weedy rice is so resilient and hard to get rid of, is the same reason they are the target for extensive research.
Though they are not profitable, they are exceptionally resilient in surviving in high temperatures and extreme weather conditions. One goal of my research project, is to investigate and confirm the genes that are responsible for heat tolerance in weedy rice, and genetically modify cultivated rice to survive in extreme conditions, thus improving rice yields.
My research potentially also branches off to the invention of a PCR-test kit, which would allow farmers in the field to use a COVID-test like device to distinguish between weedy rice and cultivated rice when planting seeds.
Additionally, if we're able to get a list of genes that have a functional impact on the growth of weedy rice plants, we can chemically engineer "gene-inhibitory" herbicides. This would only target weedy rice as those genes don't exist in cultivated rice, the rice we want!