Abstract
Male sterility is a valuable trait for plant breeding and hybrid seed production. The dominant male-sterile gene Ms2 in common wheat has facilitated the release of hundreds of breeding lines and cultivars in China. Here, we describe the map-based cloning of the Ms2 gene and show that Ms2 confers male sterility in wheat, barley and Brachypodium. MS2 appears as an orphan gene within the Triticinae and expression of Ms2 in anthers is associated with insertion of a retroelement into the promoter. The cloning of Ms2 has substantial potential to assemble practical pipelines for recurrent selection and hybrid seed production in wheat.
Highlights
Male sterility is a valuable trait for plant breeding and hybrid seed production
Using pairwise Y2H, we demonstrated that wild-type MS2 appears to form homodimers and hetrodimers, and that wild-type MS2 interacts with full-length proteins of interest (Supplementary Figs 13f and 14)
There are three dominant genic male sterility (GMS) genes reported in wheat: Ms2, Ms3, and Ms4; Ms2 is on chromosome arm 4DS14
Summary
Male sterility is a valuable trait for plant breeding and hybrid seed production. The dominant male-sterile gene Ms2 in common wheat has facilitated the release of hundreds of breeding lines and cultivars in China. Plant male sterility genes are useful for cereal breeding and hybrid seed production. A three-line hybrid rice that uses the CMS trait was introduced in China after 1974 If a male sterility gene were cloned, genetic modification could be used to develop improved methods for improved hybrid production in major crops[8,9]. By 2010, RMs2-based systems had produced 42 wheat cultivars planted on a total of 12.3 mha, with an increased grain yield of 5.6 million tons. Today both Ms2- and RMs2-based recurrent selection systems are widely used in wheat-breeding programs in China during the recurrent selection phase. New wheat varieties are often bred in a ten or more generation process that includes recombination of parental lines (which is greatly assisted by male sterility in an autogamous crop), selection of recombinants during the ‘recurrent selection’ phase, followed by five or more generations of selfing
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