Gene tagging in rice: a high throughput system for functional genomics.

Rice, with its small genome size and well-characterized molecular information, is an ideal model plant for cereal genomics research. Sequence of the rice (Oryza sativa) genome will be determined by the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP) in the near future. Therefore, a large population of mutant plants should be required for adequately assigning function to the abundant sequence information. Here we summarize strategies as well as the progress that has been made in producing gene tags that may be invaluable for understanding the functional genomics of rice.