About insertion mutagenesis in rice

Rice Genome sequencing

Following the sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome (AGI, 2000, Nature, 408:796-815), the 400Mbp rice genome has been sequenced by the public International Rice Genome Sequencing Project consortium (IRSP,2005, nature,436(7052):793-800. ): after the publication of the pseudomolecules of Chromosomes 1, 4 and 10 have been published (Sasaki et al. Nature 420: 312- 316, Feng et al Nature 420:316-320, Chr10 sequencing consortium Science, 300: 1566-1569 ). This breakthrough followed 3 independent shot gun sequencings conducted by two private companies - Monsanto and Syngenta - and the Chinese national initiative at the Beijing Genomics Institute in japonica and indica rice respectively (for a comprehensive review see Delseny 2003 Curr Opin Plant Biol., 6:101-105 ).

Together with a collection of more than 1,100,000 rice ESTs in the public databases and the release of 32,127 full length cDNAs (Kikuchi et al. 2003 Science 301: 376-379 ) there is now an enormous wealth of rice sequence information available. The next challenge is clearly to assign a biological role to these sequences, the function of only a few thousand of which can be defined with great confidence based on sequence similarity with genes of known function.
More than 42,000 non TE genes have been predicted in rice according to TIGR annotation, compared to the 27,000 genes identified in Arabidopsis, which already revealed large multigene families present as clustered and/or dispersed copies. 80% of the Arabidopsis genes proved to have a homolog in rice whereas nearly half of the predicted rice genes have no homolog in the model dicot species (Yu et al 2002 Science 296: 79-91). On the other hand 98% of the genes known in cereals are found in the rice genome, confirming the potential of the model monocot for discovering gene function in other cereal crops.

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