and represent a
significant advance for increasing the precision of identification
and incorporation of blast R genes. To date, over 30
major R genes and 10 quantitative trait loci for blast resistance
have been identified and some of them have been tagged for
marker-assisted selection (MAS) (Causse et al. 1994,
McCouch et al. 1994, Zhang and Yu 2000, Gowda et al.
2003, Ramalingam et al. 2003, Wang 2003).