KitBase: A Fully Indexed Rice Genomic Resource Using 4,000 Kitaake Based Mutant Population

Kitaake is an early flowering, short-statured, short life cycled rice cultivar, which is easy to transform compared with other Japonica and Indica rice varieties. We have generated a mutant population of Kitaake using fast-neutron mutagenesis. In collaboration with the Joint Genome Institute, we have begun sequencing and analysis of 4,000 Kitaake rice mutants with a goal of generating resource that has a 97% likelihood of identifying mutations in a gene of interest. To date we have sequenced 1000 mutants. Genomic analysis of 41 mutants and the parental line revealed a total of 2357 mutations affecting 1310 unique genes. The mutations include 1278 single base substitutions (SBS), 862 deletions, 147 insertions, 28 translocations, 37 inversions, and 5 tandem duplications. We have also developed a user-friendly database, named KitBase, which allows users to obtain sequence and phenotypic data for each of the mutant lines. This resource will be useful for both forward and reverse genetic studies.