During 3rd-7th 2012,the 23th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research was held at the Hofburg imperial palace in the beautiful cith Vienna, Austria. Prof. Bin Han was invited to give a plenary talk at the session "Genetics and Genomics Beyond Arabidopsis thaliana" on Friday, 6 July. The title of the talk was "Constructing a comprehensive map of rice genome variation from population-scale genome sequencing". Dr. Xuehui Huang gave a talk on the "Sequence-based genome-wide assocation study of complex traits in rice" at the concurrent session "Lifting yield bariers in breeding".