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More than half of the world's population depends on rice as a principal source of calories and nutrition. And from a scientific perspective, the genome of this prolific grain offers clues for others, including corn, wheat, and barley. While its cereal cousins dwarf rice's 400-Mb genome, nearly all of the proteins found in these other staples have homologs in rice. As such, rice serves as a model for all cereal agriculture. Unraveling its code may enable scientists to address world hunger in new ways.
In this issue's Hot Papers, Huanming Yang and others at the Beijing Genomics Institute/Center of Genomics and Bioin-formatics produced a draft sequence for the genome of Oryza sativa, subspecies indica, the most widely cultivated subspecies in China and Asia Pacific regions.1 In the same issue of Science, Stephen Goff of Syngenta (a spinoff company of Novartis) and colleagues published their summary ...
