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  • Correspondence
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MutMap accelerates breeding of a salt-tolerant rice cultivar

Nature Biotechnology volume 33, pages 445–449 (2015)Cite this article

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To the Editor:

Following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that affected Japan, >20,000 ha of rice paddy field was inundated with seawater, resulting in salt contamination of the land. As local rice landraces are not tolerant of high salt concentrations, we set out to develop a salt-tolerant rice cultivar. We screened 6,000 ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) mutant lines of a local elite cultivar, 'Hitomebore', and identified a salt-tolerant mutant that we name hitomebore salt tolerant 1 (hst1). In this Correspondence, we report how we used our MutMap method1 to rapidly identify a loss-of-function mutation responsible for the salt tolerance of hst1 rice. The salt-tolerant hst1 mutant was used to breed a salt-tolerant variety named 'Kaijin', which differs from Hitomebore by only 201 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Field trials showed that it has the same growth and yield performance as the parental line under normal growth conditions. Notably, production of this salt-tolerant mutant line ready for delivery to farmers took only two years using our approach.

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Figure 1: hst1 is tolerant of salt stress.
Figure 2: Identification of the hst1 mutation by MutMap.
Figure 3: Field evaluation of hst1 and the new salt-tolerant variety Kaijin.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank H. Hirochika and A. Miyao (National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences, Tsukuba, Japan) for providing the Tos17 insertion lines NE0017 and NF6804; the Rice Genome Research Center, Japan, for CSSL lines; T. Nakagawa (Shimane University, Japan) for providing the pGWB3 vector; and T. Endo (Miyagi Prefecture, Japan) for providing advice on field evaluation of rice salinity tolerance. R.T. was funded by the Science and Technology Research Promotion Program for Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries and Food Industry, Japan, grant-in-aid for MEXT (Scientific Research on Innovative Areas 23113009) and JSPS KAKENHI (grant no. 24248004). S.K. was supported by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, the European Research Council (ERC) and the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Iwate Biotechnology Research Center, Kitakami, Iwate, Japan

    Hiroki Takagi, Muluneh Tamiru, Akira Abe, Aiko Uemura, Hiroki Yaegashi, Tsutomu Obara, Kaori Oikawa, Hiroe Utsushi, Eiko Kanzaki, Chikako Mitsuoka, Satoshi Natsume, Hiroyuki Kanzaki & Ryohei Terauchi

  2. The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, UK

    Kentaro Yoshida & Sophien Kamoun

  3. Kazusa DNA Research Institute, Kisarazu, Chiba, Japan

    Shunichi Kosugi

  4. Gene Research Center, Shinshu University, Ueda, Nagano, Japan

    Hideo Matsumura

  5. Okinawa Prefectural Agricultural Research Center, Itoman, Okinawa, Japan

    Naoya Urasaki

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  1. Hiroki Takagi
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Contributions

H.T., A.A., K.Y., H.K. conceived the idea and carried out the screen, genetic analyses, MutMap and breeding. A.U., H.Y., H.U., C.M., S.N., S.K. (Kosugi), H.M., N.U. carried out genome sequencing and bioinformatic analyses. T.O. carried out the field analysis. K.O., E.K. carried out genetic transformation. S.K. (Kamoun), M.T. and R.T. conceived the idea, supervised the work and wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Hiroki Takagi or Ryohei Terauchi.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Takagi, H., Tamiru, M., Abe, A. et al. MutMap accelerates breeding of a salt-tolerant rice cultivar. Nat Biotechnol 33, 445–449 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3188

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