Rice
In future climates, rice crops will be frequently exposed to water deficit and heat stress at the most sensitive flowering stage, causing spikelet sterility and yield losses. Water deficit alone and in combination with heat stress significantly reduced peduncle elongation, trapping 32% and 55% of spikelets within the leaf sheath, respectively. Trapped spikelets had lower spikelet fertility (66% in...
Type II diabetes is a major chronic disease. In developing countries, the prevalence of type II diabetes is increasing enormously. Much research indicates that choice of carbohydrates, particularly those with low glycaemic index (GI) is able to assist in the management or prevention of type II diabetes. Most developing countries consume rice as the staple. The objectives of this study were to determine...
Hybrid weakness phenomena in rice reportedly have two causes: those of HWC1 and HWC2 genes and those of HWA1 and HWA2 genes. No detailed study of the latter has been reported. For this study, we first produced crosses among cultivars carrying the weakness-causing allele on the HWA1 and HWA2 loci to confirm the phenotype of the hybrid weakness and the genotypes of the cultivars on the two loci, as...
Plants have developed several morphological and physiological strategies to adapt to phosphate stress. We analyzed the inducible transcripts associated with phosphate starvation and over-abundant phosphate supply to characterize the transcriptome in rice seedlings using the mRNA-Seq strategy. Fifty-three million reads obtained from 16 libraries under various phosphate stress and recovery treatments...
OsSUT2 encodes a putative sucrose transporter containing 12 transmembrane domains in rice plants. Subcellular localization of the OsSUT2::GFP fusion protein indicated that OsSUT2 is a cell membrane protein. In embryos of germinating seeds, the expression of OsSUT2 gradually increased during the early germinating stage. The developmental regulations of OsSUT2 in germinating embryos could be mediated...
Cultivated rice (Oryza sativa L.) is derived from Asian wild rice (Oryza rufipogon Griff). Vietnamese local varieties and wild natural populations in Vietnam and Myanmar were examined to evaluate the levels of genetic variation in cultivated and wild rice. In total, 222 Vietnamese local varieties were analyzed with ten microsatellite markers. Using marker genotype and gene diversity data, the local...
Often overlooked is the importance of early-maturing rice varieties with their ability to escape droughts, avoid floods, and in some localities, open up the opportunity for double cropping. Most varieties grown in the tropics until the last half century matured in 150 to 180 days or longer and were photoperiod sensitive. However, non-photoperiod sensitive one-hundred-day varieties were grown in the...
This paper discusses the origins of Oryza sativa japonica rice cultivation in the Yangzi region of China and asks how and with which migrating human populations it spread south to reach Taiwan by 3,000 BC and Southeast Asia by 2,000 BC. The perspective adopted is that the spread of rice was driven mainly by demographic expansion, associated with a spread of languages and archaeological material culture...
Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples are thought to be related to ancestral Austronesian-speaking peoples. Currently, Taiwan has 14 officially acknowledged aboriginal tribes. The major crops currently farmed in aboriginal areas are rice (Oryza sativa) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica). Archeologists recently excavated the remains of several early cultures in Taiwan. The most plentiful plant remains were...
Population genetic studies may provide crucial information for our knowledge on human peopling history and have been extensively applied to reconstruct East Asian prehistory in the last 10 years. However, different genetic investigations are not always consistent with each other and some results are conflicting or misinterpreted. This represents a main obstacle for scholars of other disciplines like...
The Dravidian languages, now spoken mainly in peninsular India, form one of two main branches of the Zagrosian language family, whose other main branch consists of Elamitic and Brahui. Proto-Dravidian, the oldest reconstructible form of Dravidian, shows a society whose economy is based mainly on herding. While the speakers of Proto-Dravidian had some agricultural knowledge, they do not appear to have...
The process of moving from collecting plants in the wild to cultivating and gradually domesticating them has as its linguistic corollary the formation of a specific vocabulary to designate the plants and their parts, the fields in which they are cultivated, the tools and activities required to cultivate them and the food preparations in which they enter. From this point of view, independent domestications...
There are few archaeological projects incorporating archaeobotanical sampling and even fewer published archaeobotanical studies in Thailand. Available data show that rice was the ubiquitous cereal in prehistory and particularly during the Metal/Iron Age. This either signifies the importance of rice as a crop or signals a preservation bias; both topics are considered in this paper. The site Khao Sam...
Southwest China played a pivotal role in the spread of agriculture across East and Southeast Asia. Both rice and millet were important in the spread of populations and the expansion of agriculture into this region. Recent finds in the mountainous peripheries of Sichuan Province show that the earliest inhabitants of this region practiced a combination of broomcorn and foxtail millet agriculture (ca...
Modern genetics, ecology and archaeology are combined to reconstruct the domestication and diversification of rice. Early rice cultivation followed two pathways towards domestication in India and China, with selection for domestication traits in early Yangtze japonica and a non-domestication feedback system inferred for ‘proto-indica’. The protracted domestication process finished around 6,500–6,000 years...
The languages of Northeast Asia show evidence of dispersal from south to north, consistent with the hypothesis that agriculture spread north and east from the vicinity of Liaoning, beginning with the millets approximately 5500 BP. Wet rice agriculture in Korea and Japan results from a later spread, also beginning in Shandong, crossing via the Liaodong peninsula and reaching the Korean peninsula around...
Submergence tolerance is an important trait where short term flash flooding damages rice. Tolerant landraces that withstand submergence for 1–2 weeks were identified. Due to the heterogeneity in flood-prone ecosystem many different types of traditional rice cultivars are being grown by the farmers. The local landraces adapted to extremes in water availability could be the sources of genetic variation...