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Plant science

Hybrid vigour characterized

Nature volume 537, pages 620–621 (2016)Cite this article

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Crossing different plant varieties to improve yield and fertility is common practice. A dissection of the genomic architecture that underlies such hybrid vigour might help to inform future crop-improvement strategies. See Article p.629

Starting from 17 representative elite rice hybrid lines, the authors bred first and second generations to produce more than 10,000 hybrid rice lines, which they characterized for quantitative traits — most importantly, grain yield, flowering time and plant architecture. They also performed DNA sequencing for each line, to map the genomic regions associated with yield-related traits. They classified these lines into three main groups on the basis of hybrid-breeding strategies.

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Figure 1: Hybrid rice grown in a terraced paddy field.

Bin Han

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. James A. Birchler is in the Division of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA.,

    James A. Birchler

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  1. James A. Birchler
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Correspondence to James A. Birchler.

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Birchler, J. Hybrid vigour characterized. Nature 537, 620–621 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19433

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