Phenotypic evolution of appearance quality and cooking and taste quality of hybrid rice over the past 40 years in China.

Since the inception of hybrid rice technology 50 years ago, it has not only substantially increased rice yield per unit area but also expedited the development of high-quality rice varieties. However, the evolutionary characteristics of hybrid rice quality remain unclear. To address this gap, it is imperative to leverage more representative and comprehensive hybrid rice resources to analyze phenotypic variation diversity and its primary genetic basis, thereby offering more efficient guidance for molecular breeding.

Genomic architecture of heterosis for yield traits in rice.

Increasing grain yield is a long-term goal in crop breeding to meet the demand for global food security. Heterosis, when a hybrid shows higher performance for a trait than both parents, offers an important strategy for crop breeding. To examine the genetic basis of heterosis for yield in rice, here we generate, sequence and record the phenotypes of 10,074 F lines from 17 representative hybrid rice crosses.

Genomic analysis of hybrid rice varieties reveals numerous superior alleles that contribute to heterosis.

Exploitation of heterosis is one of the most important applications of genetics in agriculture. However, the genetic mechanisms of heterosis are only partly understood, and a global view of heterosis from a representative number of hybrid combinations is lacking. Here we develop an integrated genomic approach to construct a genome map for 1,495 elite hybrid rice varieties and their inbred parental lines.