Distribution and characterization of over 1000 T‐DNA tags in rice genome

Abstract

Summary: We generated T‐DNA insertions throughout the rice genome for saturation mutagenesis. More than 1000 flanking sequences were mapped on 12 rice chromosomes. Our results showed that T‐DNA tags were not randomly spread on rice chromosomes and were preferentially inserted in gene‐rich regions. Few insertions (2.4%) were found in repetitive regions. T‐DNA insertions in genic (58.1%) and intergenic regions (41.9%) showed a good correlation with the predicted size distribution of these sequences in the rice genome. Whereas, obvious biases were found for the insertions in the 5′‐ and 3′‐regulatory regions outside the coding regions both at 500‐bp size and in introns rather than in exons. Such distribution patterns and biases for T‐DNA integration in rice are similar to that of the previous report in Arabidopsis , which may result from T‐DNA integration mechanism itself. Rice will require approximately the same number of T‐DNA insertions for saturation mutagenesis as will Arabidopsis . A database of the T‐DNA insertion sites in rice is publicly available at our web site ( http://www.genomics.zju.edu.cn/ricetdna ).