Abstract
Grain weight is a major determinant of crop grain yield and is controlled by naturally occurring quantitative trait loci (QTLs). We earlier identified a major QTL that controls rice grain width and weight, GW5, which was mapped to a recombination hotspot on rice chromosome 5. To gain a better understanding of how GW5 controls rice grain width, we conducted fine mapping of this locus and uncovered a 1 212-bp deletion associated with the increased grain width in the rice cultivar Asominori, in comparison with the slender grain rice IR24. In addition, genotyping analyses of 46 rice cultivars revealed that this deletion is highly correlated with the grain-width phenotype, suggesting that the GW5 deletion might have been selected during rice domestication. GW5 encodes a novel nuclear protein of 144 amino acids that is localized to the nucleus. Furthermore, we show that GW5 physically interacts with polyubiquitin in a yeast two-hybrid assay. Together, our results suggest that GW5 represents a major QTL underlying rice width and weight, and that it likely acts in the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway to regulate cell division during seed development. This study provides novel insights into the molecular mechanisms controlling rice grain development and suggests that GW5 could serve as a potential tool for high-yield breeding of crops.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants from the National Basic Research Program of China (grant no. 2006CB101706) and the Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) (grant no. 2006AA100101). We are grateful to Professor A Yoshimura, Kyushu University, Japan, for kindly providing us with the CSSL populations. We thank Dr Hai Yang Wang at the Boyce Thompson Institute of Cornell University for critically reading this paper. We also thank Dr Xing Wang Deng at the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology of Yale University for sharing the tiling array data of the 9311 cultivar.
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Weng, J., Gu, S., Wan, X. et al. Isolation and initial characterization of GW5, a major QTL associated with rice grain width and weight. Cell Res 18, 1199–1209 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/cr.2008.307
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/cr.2008.307
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