Focus on Rice: Towards Better Understanding of the Life Cycle of Crop Plants

Abstract

Rice is the most widely consumed cereal for more than half of the world’s population, especially in Asian countries. In addition to its utmost economic importance as a staple food crop, rice has become an ideal model species for biological research of monocot crop plants, because of the availability of whole-genome sequences for both indica and japonica subspecies, abundant genomic resources, highly efficient transformation approaches, and plentiful genetic materials. After rice genome sequences were released in 2002, rice biology research came to the era of functional genomics.