Hormonal signal transduction in rice

Abstract

The compact nature of the rice genome provides a distinct advantage in gene isolation and genomic sequencing in contrast to other cereal crops. Further, the rice genome shows apparent syntenies with many other cereal crops such as wheat, barley, and maize (reviewed by Devos 2005). These syntenies suggest that rice genomics has implications not only for rice genetic studies and breeding, but also for other crops. Thus, rice has been selected as a target species for genome research by a number of research groups, and the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP) was launched in 1998, with the participation of ten countries (Sasaki et al. 2002). In 2004, the IRGSP declared the completion of the whole rice genome sequence, which provides very useful information for studying rice biology. Using this advantage and others in rice biology such as tagging libraries, transformation techniques, and full-length cDNA clones (An et al. 2005; Sasaki et al. 2005), we and other groups have been studying the signal transduction mechanisms of some phytohormones such as gibberellin (GA), brassinosteroid (BR), and auxin.