Abstract
We have produced a collection of rice lines containing insertions of the retrotransposon Tos17. Since Tos17 is only activated by tissue culture, the induced mutations are very stable and hereditary. To identify novel genes required for R gene-mediated recognition and signal transduction in disease resistance, we applied this mutant panel to a forward screen using rice blast fungus Magnaporthe grysea. The challenge of incompatible race of the fungus against wild type cultivar Nipponbare caused clearly HR lesions on the leaves, whereas typical disease symptom was observed on susceptible plants. The easy evaluation of lesion phenotype let us do the high-throughput screening. To date we found some mutants compromised in resistance moderately. Furthermore, among the mutant lines we selected several lesion mimic mutants and classified them by the expression profile of defense related genes. Some of the mutations were tagged by Tos17 and the disrupted genes were identified.
