Resequencing 50 Accessions of Cultivated and Wild Rice to Hasten Rice Improvement

Fifty accessions of cultivated and wild rices have been resequenced by the Beijing Genome Institute (BGI). The Study published in Nature Biotechnology also investigated genome-wide variation patterns in rice and obtained 6.5 million high quality single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).

Xun Xu, Vice President of Research and Development Department at BGI, and the lead author of the paper said that "the high-quality variation data will greatly facilitate the identification of functional variations and be useful for marker-assisted breeding and gene mapping of rice."

The data generated by the study provides information for the further understanding of the history of domestication of rice and fast identification of agronomically important genes to improve the quality and yield of rice. BGI partnered with Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Graduate University of Chinese Academy Sciences, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Life Sciences, and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), among others.

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