Abstract
Recently, genes required for photoperiodic flowering of rice were discovered. It is well known that rice cultivars which are widely grown in the world show a large diversity among them. Flowering time is one such example. Thus, we focused on study of the natural variation of photoperiodic flowering pathway in rice. The aim of this study is to understand the mechanism which generates the diversity of flowering time in rice.
We study the relationship between the expression levels of flowering time genes and flowering time among the cultivars in the rice core collection. The results showed that a strong correlation between flowering time and Hd3a expression level was observed. Furthermore, high level nucleotide polymorphisms which affect protein function were found in Hd1. These results suggest that Hd1 is one of the main sources for generating the diversity in flowering time rice cultivars in the world.
