Artificial intelligence and tissue culture: Transforming rice regeneration systems

The enhancement of rice through genetic means is important to solving food security concerns due primarily to its status as the main source of nutrition for more than half of the people living in the world today. Plant tissue culture has been used for many decades for regenerating and transforming rice; however, the method has had issues due to limitations such as plant genotype dependency, poor media compositions, and high variability in plant responses that regenerate through tissue culture. These limitations have been documented by previous studies which have stated that there is a need for improved methods of accurately regenerating crops. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has been incorporated into plant biotechnology as a new technology with the ability to assist scientists in developing data-based solutions to improve complex biological systems, such as crop regeneration. This mini review will focus on the application of AI to enhance the regeneration of rice via tissue culture and discuss how the optimisation of culture conditions, the use of predictive models, automating monitoring and smart systems will all result in increased rates of crop regeneration and increased levels of predictability with experimentation. AI will fundamentally change the field of rice biotechnology by increasing reproducibility, and accelerating the improvement of crops enhanced through genetic engineering.