“…Molecular mapping and markerassisted breeding approaches helped in molecular breeding for BB resistance in a large scale (Sundaram et al, 2008). At least 46 major BB resistance genes and 17 QTLs conferring tolerance have been identified and characterized (Bhasin et al, 2012;Han et al, 2014;Kim et al, 2015) from diverse rice germplasm, and some of them are currently employed in BB resistance breeding programmes either singly or by pyramiding few genes in the genetic background of popular varieties and hybrid rice parental lines (Chen et al, 2020;Kumar et al, 2020;Neelam et al, 2020;Zhao et al, 2022). Among these, 12 BB resistance genes have been cloned, namely, Xa1 (Yoshimura et al, 1998), Xa3/Xa26 (Sun et al, 2004;Xiang et al, 2006), Xa4 (Hu et al, 2017), xa5 (Iyer & McCouch, 2004), Xa7 (Chen et al, 2021), Xa10 (Tian et al, 2014), xa13 (Chu et al, 2006), Xa21 (Song et al, 1997), Xa23 (Wang et al, 2015), xa25 (Liu et al, 2011), Xa27 (Bimolata et al, 2013;Gu et al, 2004) and xa41 (Hutin et al, 2015), which are reported to encode different types of proteins.…”