Empowering rice breeding with NextGen genomics tools for rapid enhancement nitrogen use efficiency.

• There is a soaring increase of the N fertilizers prices and the problems caused by excess use of N fertilizers forced the rice breeders to rethink other sustainable, affordable, accessible, and globally acceptable strategies. • Multidisciplinary scientific collaboration promotes innovation that leads to the development of rice varieties that use nitrogen most effectively, facilitate smart technology transfer, and promote the adoption of NUE practices by farmers and stakeholders and minimize environmental impact and contribute to a sustainable agricultural future. • The utilization of recent omics technologies, for instance, genomics and pan-genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, ionomics, fluxomics and nutrigenomics could provide us an overview and facilitate our deep global understanding on NUE. As rice has no physiological capacity of fixing nitrogen in the soil, its production had always been reliant on the external application of nitrogen (N) to ensure enhanced productivity. In the light of improving nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) in rice, several advanced agronomic strategies have been proposed. However, the soared increase of the prices of N fertilizers and subsequent environmental downfalls caused by the excessive use of N fertilizers, reinforces the prerequisite adaptation of other sustainable, affordable, and globally acceptable strategies. An appropriate alternative approach would be to develop rice cultivars with better NUE. Conventional breeding techniques, however, have had only sporadic success in improving NUE, and hence, this paper proposes a new schema that employs the wholesome benefits of the recent advancements in omics technologies. The suggested approach promotes multidisciplinary research, since such cooperation enables the synthesis of many viewpoints, approaches, and data that result in a comprehensive understanding of NUE in rice. Such collaboration also encourages innovation that leads to developing rice varieties that use nitrogen more effectively, facilitate smart technology transfer, and promotes the adoption of NUE practices by farmers and stakeholders to minimize ecological impact and contribute to a sustainable agricultural future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]