N.V. Kayande¹ , Majid Sattari²

1. Department of Agricultural Botany, Post Graduate Institute, Mahatma Phule Krishi Vidyapeeth, Rahuri District- Ahmednagar-413722, Maharashtra, India
2. Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Rice Research Institute of Iran, P.O.Box 145, Amol, Iran
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2013, Vol. 4, No. 1   
Received: 17 Dec., 2012    Accepted: 24 Dec., 2012    Published: 01 Jan., 1970

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

For feeding the increasing population and enhancing the productivity of rice, commercial exploitation of heterosis is essential. The combination of cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) in one parent and a restorer gene (Rf) to restore fertility in another is indispensable for the development of hybrid varieties. Searching for a restorer gene is a good approach when phenotyping is very time-consuming and requires the determination of spikelet sterility in testcross progeny. Wild abortive (WA) cytoplasm is widely used for hybrid seed production in rice. There are three major CMS types: HL, BT and WA. Rf3 for CMS-WA is located on chromosome 1, while Rf1, Rf4, Rf5 and Rf6 correspond to CMS-BT, CMS-WA and CMS-HL, located on chromosome 10. Molecular mapping led to the development of PCR-based markers linked to Rf genes and the application of marker-aided selection (MAS) for restorer genes, which would increase the efficiency of selecting putative restorer lines. In addition to the use of markers in MAS procedures, these markers can also be used to transfer Rf genes into adapted cultivars through a backcrossing programme in an active hybrid rice breeding programme.

CMS; Fertility restorer gene; Hybrid rice; Marker-aided selection; Rf3; Rf4; Wild abortive