New Rice for Africa the Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD-IV) in 2008. The new rice varieties, which are suited to drylands, were distributed and sown on more than 200,000 hectares during the last five years in several African countries, notably Guinea, Nigeria, Mali, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, and Uganda, according to the Africa Rice Center. Though this represents a major advance, it is still projected to fall short of meeting the growing demand for rice as a food staple. African rice "Oryza glaberrima" has been cultivated for 3,500 years and is well adapted to the African environment. African rice has profuse vegetative
Plant genome assembly products were used to clone remaining gaps, and YACs allowed the characterization of telomere sequences. The resulting sequenced regions were 115.4 Mb of the 125 Mb predicted size of the genome and a total of 25,498 of protein-coding genes. To sequence and assemble the genome of Oryza Sativa (japonica), the same strategy was used. For Oryza Sativa a total of 3,401 mapped clones in a minimum tiling path were selected from the physical map and assembled. One of the most important crops in the world, maize (Zea mays), is the last plant genome project primarily based on Sanger BAC-by-BAC strategy.