Use of KitBase to Facilitate Forward and Reverse Genetics Research in Rice

Mutagenized populations are useful for studying gene function in plants. We have generated a mutant population in the model rice cultivar Kitaake using fast-neutron mutagenesis. Kitaake is an early flowering, short-statured, short life cycle rice that is easy to transform, compared with other Japonica and Indica rice varieties. In collaboration with Joint Genome Institute, we are sequencing 4,000 mutants. Genomic analysis of more than 1,000 mutants has been done, revealed that 13,469 genes are affected. Mutation types include single base substitutions, deletions, insertions, inversions, translocations, tandem duplications and complex events. Single base substitutions predominate, but deletions affect the greatest number of genes, accounting for 57.2% of all affected genes. Using the same FN population we have carried out a forward genetic screen for mutants that suppress XA21-mediated immunity. We identified ten mutants from this screen and in several cases, have isolated the affected gene. KitBase, a comprehensive repository for rice mutant information is publically available to the scientific community. KitBase integrates JBrowse and BLAST to facilitate identification of mutations and searching of the database. The first phase of KitBase includes genomic data, phenotypic data, and seed information for each of the mutant lines.