Rice Aids in the Study of Biofuel Feedstocks

(U.S. Department of Energy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory/Ethanol Producer Magazine) Rice is a staple food for over half of the world's population and a model for studies of candidate bioenergy grasses such as sorghum, switchgrass, and Miscanthus. To optimize crops for biofuel production, scientists are seeking to identify genes that control key traits such as yield, resistance to disease, and water use efficiency.

Populations of mutant plants, each one having one or more genes altered, are an important tool for elucidating gene function. With whole-genome sequencing at the single nucleotide level, researchers can infer the functions of the genes by observing the gain or loss of particular traits. But the utility of existing rice mutant collections has been limited by several factors, including the cultivars' relatively long six-month life cycle and the lack of sequence information for most of the mutant lines.

In a paper published in The Plant Cell, a team led by Pamela Ronald, a professor in the Genome Center and the Department of Plant Pathology at UC Davis and director of Grass Genetics at the Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute, with collaborators from UC Davis and the DOE Joint Genome Institute, reported the first whole-genome-sequenced, fast-neutron-induced mutant population of Kitaake, a model rice variety with a short life cycle. READ MORE Abstract (The Plant Cell)