Lotus japonicus 'Miyakojima' MG-20:: An early-flowering accession suitable for indoor handling

Lotus japonicus (Regel) Larsen is a long-day plant and requires intense light for continuous flowering. Therefore, the genetic analysis of this plant has been conducted frequently in a green house equipped with supplementary light. In order to bring about indoor genetics as has been carried out with Arabidopsis, early-flowering accessions suitable for indoor handling have been searched for throughout Japan. As a result, a plant that grows naturally in Miyakojima, the nearly southernmost island in the Japan archipelago, was collected as the earliest-flowering accession with such characteristics. The accession was named as Miyakojima MG-20. Self-pollination was repeated 7 times in an insect-free biotron to establish Miyakojima MG-20-S7 germplasm. Using this accession, development of an infrastructure such as a large-scale expressed sequence tag (EST) analysis, ion-beam mutagenesis and high-resolution mapping has been started.