History in a grain of rice

PROFESSORS PIETRO M. MOTTA © TOMONORI NAGURO / PHOTO RESEARCHERS

The paper:

The finding:

Using computational programs developed at the Beijing Genomics Institute, Jun Yu led a team that improved the genome assembliesﾠof both indica and japonica rice cultivars and compared the genomes to understand its evolutionary history.

The surprise:

Duplicated segments account for 65.7% of the genome. That was more than expected, says Pat Heslop-Harrison at the University of Leicester: "We thought the duplication of genes as well as repeats could not be easily coped with and would lead to genomic imbalances."

The follow-up:

Yu's team is now using microarrays to look at hybrid rice strains and compare them to parental cultivars. A better understanding of hybrid rice is important, according to Yu, because it has 20 to 25% higher yield thanﾠits parent.

The future:

This paper, says Deng, "provides the foundation for future research to form hybrid rice." It has also "enabled scientists to do a lot more with comparative genomics and better able to trace what happened between other species and increasingly between families of plants," says Heslop-Harrison.