Advance in Research on Brittleness Mutant of Rice

The strength of a rice stem is an important property that affects not only the plant's ability to resist lodging, but also its yield and quality. Commonly found, the rice's brittleness mutant could be used in breeding new grain-and-straw dual-purpose rice varieties. Since it can introduce cellulose-decrase, lignin-increase and/or nutrition-modification on rice plants, it is also important in the studies involving breeding rice for paper-making and forage. The source, formation mechanism, gene-mapping, cloning, functional research of the mutant, as well as its applications in breeding conventional transgenic and grain-and-straw dual-purpose rice are reviewed and discussed in this article.