Abstract
We isolated and characterized a rice dwarf and abnormal leaf morphology 1 (dal1) mutant, which forms the round leaves at the tip. For cloning the DAL1 gene, we produced 4,000 F2 plants by crossing the Japonica dal1 plants and an Indica rice, Kasalath. The DAL1 locus was narrow into ~40kb between two molecular markers. In this region, there were five possible genes and we focused on one gene, which encodes a katanin-like protein, because Arabidopsis katanin-like protein, FRA2, is involved in microtubule disassembly for normal growth and development of leaf and stem. We performed sequence analysis of this candidate gene in four alleles (dal1-1~4) and found that all dal1 mutants had base substitutions or deletions in DAL1. This strongly indicates that DAL1 encodes a katanin-like protein, and also suggests that the defect of the katanin-like gene causes the aberrant cortical microtubules resulting in stunted leaf and stem with abnormal morphology.
