Scientists from the USDA-Agricultural Research Service and North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, are focusing their research on understanding seed dormancy in wild oat, a serious weed worldwide. Since the wild oat genome is too large to perform map-base cloning of the dormancy and germination genes, these researchers investigated rice, with its small genome and many genetic resources, as a model system to identify and clone seed dormancy genes from grasses.
These researchers investigated the inheritance of seed dormancy in weedy strains of rice. As a first step, researchers cross-pollinated dormant weedy strains of rice with non-dormant domesticated strains to develop populations segregating for dormancy. Then they determined some classical genetic attributes, such as heritability associated with several populations segregating for dormancy.
"Our initial research demonstrated that weedy rice provides ideal gene resources to elucidate mechanisms of dormancy and to improve resistance to preharvest sprouting," said Dr. Xing-You Gu, a rice geneticist from China who collaborated on the project. Dr. Zong-Xiang Chen at Yangzhou University in China co-authored the study.
The study of the inheritance of seed dormancy in weedy rice was presented at the 7th International Workshop on Seeds in Salamanca, Spain in May 2002 and is published in the May-June issue of Crop Science.
Based on these initial investigations, the team developed a USDA-National Research Initiative competitive grant to further develop one of the populations with the goal of map-based cloning genes to regulate hull-imposed dormancy. The proposal was funded for three years begi
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Contact: Sara Uttech
suttech@agronomy.org
608-273-8080
American Society of Agronomy
1-Jul-2003