Background
The domestication process of Asian rice (
Oryza sativa
L.) is complicated. It’s well established that
Oryza rufipogon
is the ancestor of Asian rice, although the number of domestication events still controversial. Recently, numerous types of studies based on rice nuclear genome have been conducted, but the results are quite different. Chloroplasts (cp) are also part of the rice genome and have a conserved cyclic structure that is valuable for plant genetics and evolutionary studies. Therefore, we conducted chloroplast-based studies, aiming to provide more evidence for the domestication of Asian rice.
Results
A total of 1389 variants were detected from the chloroplast genomes of 412 accessions obtained through the world.
Oryza sativa
L. ssp.
japonica
exhibited slightly less diversity (
π
) than
Oryza sativa L. indica
and wild rice. The fixation index values (
F
ST
) revealed that
indica
and
japonica
exhibited farther genetic distances compared with wild rice. Across cp genome, Tajima’s
D
test demonstrated that different selection sites occurred in Asian rice. Principal component analyses (PCA) and multidimensional scaling (MDS) clearly classify the Asian rice into different groups. Furthermore, introgression patterns identified that
indica
and
japonica
shared no introgression events in cp level, and phylogenetic studies showed cultivated rice were well separated from different type of wild rice.
Conclusions
Here, we focus on the domestication of Asian rice (
indica
and
japonica
). Diversity and phylogenetic analyses revealed some selection characteristics in the chloroplast genome that potentially occurred in different Asian rice during the domestication. The results shown that Asian rice had been domesticated at least twice. In additional,
japonica
may experience a strong positive selection or bottleneck event during the domestication.
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (10.1186/s12284-019-0322-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 (BADH1), a paralog of the fragrance gene BADH2, is known to be associated with salt stress through the accumulation of synthesized glycine betaine (GB), which is involved in the response to abiotic stresses. Despite the unclear association between BADH1 and salt stress, we observed the responses of eight phenotypic characteristics (germination percentage (GP), germination energy (GE), germination index (GI), mean germination time (MGT), germination rate (GR), shoot length (SL), root length (RL), and total dry weight (TDW)) to salt stress during the germination stage of 475 rice accessions to investigate their association with BADH1 haplotypes. We found a total of 116 SNPs and 77 InDels in the whole BADH1 gene region, representing 39 haplotypes. Twenty-nine haplotypes representing 27 mutated alleles (two InDels and 25 SNPs) were highly (p < 0.05) associated with salt stress, including the five SNPs that have been previously reported to be associated with salt tolerance. We observed three predominant haplotypes associated with salt tolerance, Hap_2, Hap_18, and Hap_23, which were Indica specific, indicating a comparatively high number of rice accessions among the associated haplotypes. Eight plant parameters (phenotypes) also showed clear responses to salt stress, and except for MGT (mean germination time), all were positively correlated with each other. Different signatures of domestication for BADH1 were detected in cultivated rice by identifying the highest and lowest Tajima’s D values of two major cultivated ecotypes (Temperate Japonica and Indica). Our findings on these significant associations and BADH1 evolution to plant traits can be useful for future research development related to its gene expression.
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