Mutant Resources for Functional Analysis of the Rice Genome

Abstract

In the past 15 years a large international effort of generation of mutant collections has been accomplished in rice, the model plant for cereals and grasses. Physical and chemical mutagenesis as well as insertion mutagenesis using Agrobacterium T-DNA, endogenous Tos17 retro-element, and maize transposon systems have been used to create lesions in the 39,000 non-transposable genes annotated in the rice genome. Nowadays, 72 % of the rice genes have at least one sequence-indexed insert while 22 % have three, allelic, sequence-indexed inserts. Despite their yet incomplete coverage, these resources have already been instrumental in unraveling the function of numerous genes underlying important developmental and physiological traits through forward or reverse genetics strategies. Together with sequence-specific inactivation approaches (RNA interference and nuclease-based gene editing), mutant collections will contribute to the elucidation of the function of all agronomically important genes in rice by year 2020, an objective shared by the rice community.