There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
The pan-tropical wild relatives of rice grow in a wide variety of habitats: forests,
savanna, mountainsides, rivers and lakes. The completion of the sequencing of the
rice nuclear and cytoplasmic genomes affords an opportunity to widen our understanding
of the genomes of the genus Oryza. Research on the Oryza genus has begun to help to
answer questions related to domestication, speciation, polyploidy and ecological adaptation
that cannot be answered by studying rice alone. The wild relatives of rice have furnished
genes for the hybrid rice revolution, and other genes from Oryza species with major
impact on rice yields and sustainable rice production are likely to be found. Care
is needed, however, when using wild relatives of rice in experiments and in interpreting
the results of these experiments. Careful checking of species identity, maintenance
of herbarium specimens and recording of Genbank accession numbers of material used
in experiments should be standard procedure when studying wild relatives of rice.