Since the availability of large volume of genomic sequences, rice (Oryza sativa L.) is becoming a model cereal crop and an increasingly popular model of comparative plant genomics. Rice is not only an excellent model species for a major group of flowering plants, the monocotyledons, but also the most important food staple for the world’s population. Rapid progress in rice genomics has made it possible to undertake detailed structural and functional comparisons of genes in rice that are involved in various biological processes, as it has in the eudicotyledonous model plant Arabidopsis thaliana L.
The long-term goal of our lab is to isolate genes relating to the important agronomic traits of rice based on functional genomic approaches. We had established a rice mutant library by using γ-ray irradiation, and molecular markers distributed in rice genome were developed for further map-based cloning of functional gene
The achievement in development of hybrid rice is a great breakthrough in rice breeding which provides an effective way to markedly enhance rice yield on a large scale. Over the last quarter century, a great deal has been uncovered about the molecular genetic control of stamen and pollen development in several model systems, including tobacco, Brassica, tomato and Arabidopsis. While the related studies on rice is just commencing.
