Germplasm enhancement by developing advanced plant materials from diverse rice accessions

Genetic dissection of a wide range of naturally occurring variations in rice has significantly progressed by means of quantitative trait locus analysis. This genetic dissection has resulted in molecular cloning of genes and loci with biological and agronomic interest. The success of these analyses depends strongly on the plant materials used. In the last decade, many kinds of plant materials, and particularly advanced backcross populations, have been developed for the genetic analysis of traits of interest. Some of those materials have been deposited in the public domain in order to facilitate further analyses of rice genetics and molecular biology. In this review, we describe how such plant materials, including chromosome segment substitution lines (CSSLs) and introgression lines, could be used in genetic analysis, as well as the kinds of plant materials that could be developed and that are now available to the rice research community. Furthermore, we introduce our current activities related to large-scale development of CSSLs using diverse Asian rice accessions as donors.