A Green Revolution-Related Allele from Taiwan to the World

The rice Green Revolution (GR) at the 60’S had increased agricultural production by more than two fold worldwide. The rice breeders are currently working on the second GR, either through traditional plant breeding process to accumulate good trait, or via molecular biological technique, but still have a gap between expectation and reality. One of the opportunities to fill the gap was using the recent 3000 rice genome project (3K-RGP), which contain NGS data from 3000 rice varieties or landraces. With the information obtained from the 3K-RGP, people may perform alleles mining for further usage such as assembling a MAGIC population. The key gene for the first GR is a lost-of-function of Semi-dwarf1 (SD1) gene, came from an old Taiwan landrace, Dea-Gee-Woo-Gen (DGWG). In the current study, we investigated multiple alleles of SD1 using the 3K-RGP data. The result showed about five hundred accessions consisted of DGWG sd1 alleles, including some varieties from Taiwan, IRRI and countries worldwide. The Kasalath, i.e. full-function SD1 allele, however, were present in one-third of 3K project. The Nipponbare, i.e. partial-function SD1 allele had present in one-fourth of 3K project. That is, sd1 allele had a narrow diversity in the germplasm. Thus, we advise rice breeders to use the widely collected genomic information for choosing parental lines to include demanded traits and keep the diversity.