Background

Rice is a leading cereal crop and main staple food for over half of the world population. Rice has also become a model system of monocotyledon plants for genomic studies because of its relative small genome, mature transformation technique and completion of genomic sequencing. Uncover the functions of the entire complement of genes in rice genome is the goal of the rice research community. A common strategy for the discovery of gene function is to generate populations of DNA insertion mutants and identify the genes by screening and characterizing the mutations.

General Information

Rice Mutant Database (RMD) is developed by the Wuhan group of a joint national program, the National Special Key Program on Rice Functional Genomics of China, and maintained by the National Center of Plant Gene Research (Wuhan) at Huazhong Agricultural University. RMD currently (RMD update information) contains the information of approximate 129,000 rice T-DNA insertion (enhancer trap) lines generated by an enhancer trap system. Comprehensive information about mutant phenotypes, reporter-gene expression patterns, flanking sequences of T-DNA insertional sites, seed availability, and others are collected in the database. RMD can be searched by keywords, nucleotide sequence or protein sequence. This database provides three classes of functions: (1) identifying novel genes, (2) identifying regulatory elements, and (3) identifying pattern lines for ectopic expression (misexpression) of target gene at specific tissue or at specific growth stage.