High throughput transformation of a Sorghum cDNA library for rice improvement

Abstract

The improvement of rice productivity is an important subject due to great population pressure. As plant functional genomics rapidly develops, increasing numbers of genes from different organisms are documented for rice improvement. Sorghum, a relative of rice, has many novel phenotypic characteristics such as strong stature, large panicle, drought tolerance, and a tolerance for low soil fertility, making this species an excellent gene resource for rice improvement. A Sorghum cDNA library was transformed into rice generating an overexpression population with 1153 fertile transgenic lines. Over 900 of these lines displayed phenotypic changes including: plant height, leaf shape and size, effective panicles, and other vegetative characteristics. Importantly, there were 19 lines with higher grain yield than the wild type, which demonstrates that the high-throughput transformation of overexpressing transgenes from Sorghum into rice is a highly efficient method for rice improvement.