Beijing, China
July 7, 2008
Chinese Academy of Sciences
botanists have made novel progress on studies of origin and
domestication of the Asian cultivated rice Oryza sativa. Their
work was published in the June issue of
Genetics.
Scientists have long debates over over the origins of the Oryza
sativa from its wild ancestor O. rufipogon, focusing on a
monophyletic or polyphyletic origin.
To make clear the origins and demographic history of rice
domestication, a research team led by Prof. GAO Lizhi from the
CAS Kunming Institute of Botany, teaming up with Dr. Hideki
Innan from University of Texas, examined microsatellite
genotypes of 92 individual plants from the two O. sativa
subspecies and O. rufipogon. They found that the japonica
subspecies suffered a more severe bottleneck than did the indica
subspecies. These results suggest that indica and japonica
subspecies were not independently domesticated; the two
subspecies seem to be at least partially derived from the same
ancestral populations.
Their work indicates that the origin and domesticating mechanism
of the Asian rice might be far more complicated than thought,
according to researchers. Unlike the conventional understanding
of domestication of plants modeled after maize, in which each
crop has a species as its ancestry, the new work could promote
the studies of mode plants in which in which several cultivated
strains share one ancestry. The study is of importance in the
further exploration of comparative studies of functional
genomics and mining out more new genes noted for their valuable
functions or outstanding characteristics in the wild.
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