Abstract
Abstract Rice is a member of the genus Oryza, which has a history extending back into the Miocene. Oryza is in turn a member of the tribe Oryzeae, which along with the tribe Ehrharteae is included in the subfamily Ehrhartoideae. This paper reviews current knowledge of the genus, tribe and subfamily, and places rice in the larger evolutionary context of the entire grass family. The morphological characteristics of rice are an amalgam of characters that have originated at different times in its long evolutionary history. Increasingly, genomic characteristics are also being placed in a broad evolutionary context and it is becoming possible see which are characteristic of all grasses and which are more restricted to the genus Oryza or even to rice itself.
Highlights
The position of Oryza sativa within the angiospermsThis review will begin with the big picture of rice evolution, locating rice in successively smaller clades of plants
Rice is a member of the genus Oryza, which has a history extending back into the Miocene
Within the Poales, rice is a member of the Poaceae, the grass family, a family of flowering plants that includes over 10,000 species, including all the major cereal crops (Clayton and Renvoize 1986; Grass Phylogeny Working Group 2001; Watson and Dallwitz 1992)
Summary
This review will begin with the big picture of rice evolution, locating rice in successively smaller clades of plants. A comparison of a region of almost two megabases (Mb) between two species of banana (Musa; Zingiberales) and rice found that both Musa and Oryza had relatively high GC content (39% and 43%, respectively), when compared either to onions (a non-commelinid monocot) or to Arabidopsis (a eudicot; 36%)(Lescot et al 2008). A clade comprising seven of these families (Anarthriaceae, Restionaceae, Centrolepidaceae, Flagellariaceae, Joinvilleaceae, Ecdeiocoleaceae, and Poaceae) is sometimes known as the graminoid Poales (Campbell and Kellogg 1987; Kellogg and Linder 1995) (Fig. 2) It includes plants with distichous (two-ranked) sheathing leaves, monoporate annulate pollen, a single anatropous ovule per carpel, and plumose stigmas.
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