Strategies to Improve Plant Height for the Production of Biomass Energy in Rice

Abstract

The Japanese Council for Promotion of Biomass Utilization decided to advance the production of ethanol from biomass resources, including rice straw as a secondary product of rice crop. Rice straw is suitable as a biomass resource because it does not conflict with crop production. In rice, the improvement of plant height is the main target for increasing productivity of rice straw as a biomass resource. In this review, we describe the strategies for improvement of plant height by regulating the level of gibberellin, sucrose-phosphate synthase and nitrogen. Furthermore, we describe the recent developments in the analysis of quantitative trait locus (QTL) for plant height and discuss the possibility of increasing the productivity of rice straw as a biomass resource by accumulation of near-isogenic lines (NILs) carrying QTLs.