| With the improvement of people's living standards, the demand for rice shows a trend of diversification. The quality of rice has been paid more and more attention, while the yield is still an important indicator. Increasing yield and improving quality have been two main goals of modern rice breeding. Rice grain length is not only an important agronomic trait affecting rice yield, but also closely related to appearance quality traits. Slender grain rice usually has better appearance quality, and consumers in most parts of the world would prefer long grain rice. Therefore, improving rice grain length has
become a very important goal for breeding. Grain length is a quantitative trait in rice, and its genetic mechanism is also complex. It is important to analyze its genetic characteristics and identify quantitative trait loci (QTL) related to rice grain size. At the same time, with the rapid development of next-generation sequencing technology and functional genomics, the research on rice grain length had made great progress. At present, more than 120 QTLs related to rice grain length had been located, and some genes had been cloned. In this paper, the influencing factors of rice grain length, the relationship between grain length and other related traits, QTL mapping, cloning and functional analysis of important grain length genes, and application of grain length gene in molecular breeding were reviewed in order to provide references for improving rice yield and quality. |
