The National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) has completed and opened access to the whole-genome sequencing data of the 69 accessions of the World Rice Core Collection (WRC) in Research Center of Genetic Resources (NGRC). It enables users to identify the genome information of target trait in these accessions, and it is expected to promote various breeding and research projects.
Overview
Rice is a staple food in Japan which is produced 7.5 million ton annually, and there has been continuous development of new rice cultivars nationwide to assure stable production of high quality rice. However, to cope with recent climate change and demand for new cultivars for new purposes, it became crucial to utilize not only the limited resource of domestic cultivars, but also more diverse resource of the world. Foreign rice cultivars may carry traits which cannot be found in domestic ones, such as resistance to a disease or processing suitability. In order to efficiently introduce these traits into domestic cultivars, it is essential to establish a genome database to find responsible genes for traits and to understand their genome information to promote their research.
NARO has been fostered and supplied World Rice Core Collections (WRC) for researchers to access easily to the seeds of diverse rice cultivars of the world since 2005. Today, NARO had completed the whole-genome sequencing data of 69 accession of the collection, and opened access to this invaluable resource. Now researchers and breeders can see the genome information of these rice cultivars at a glance and it is expected to further accelerate the research and rice breeding.
Publication
Tanaka, N., Shenton, M., Kawahara Y., Kumagai M., Sakai, H., Kanamori H., Yonemaru J., Fukuoka S., Sugimoto K., Ishimoto, M., Wu, J. and Ebana, K. (2020). Whole-genome sequencing of the NARO World Rice Core Collection (WRC) as the basis for diversity and association studies.Plant and Cell Physiology https://doi.org/10.1093/pcp/pcaa019
For Inquiries
Contact: http://www.naro.go.jp/english/inquiry/index.html
Reference Information
Fig.1 Making a Core Collection
A Core Collection consists of the minimum number of accessions which retain genetic diversity of whole accessions.
Fig. 2 NARO World Rice Core Collection (WRC) (unhulled rice)
The collection consists of 69 accessions with a high degree of genetic diversity and was selected from the whole rice collection maintained at the NARO Genebank (about 40 thousands accessions).
