Rice is a staple crop for more than half of the world's population, and it was hoped that the availability of its genome sequence might enable scientists to develop more productive and environment friendly rice strains. Furthermore, the rice genome might provide the key to understanding the genetics of other major cereal crops, as all of them have much larger genomes. After the completion of a draft sequence of the Chinese hybrid rice genome, which was published in the Journal Science in 2002, CAS researchers have recently finished the fine map of the rice genome. In an article published by the recent issue of PLoS Biology (Vol.3 Issue 2,2005), scientists led by the Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG) reported a "much improved, near-complete genome analysis of the indica and japonica subspecies of O. saliva."
展开▼
