Koshihikari: a premium short-grain rice cultivar – its expansion and breeding in Japan

Abstract

Koshihikari, a Japanese short-grain rice cultivar, was developed in 1956, more than 60 years ago. Despite its age, it has been the most widely grown cultivar in Japan for more than 35 years, making it the most important rice for the Japanese people. In its early days, there was no reason to predict that Koshihikari would become so widely disseminated. However, since the end of the post–World War II food shortage in the 1960s, Japanese preferences changed from high productivity to good eating quality. This triggered wide expansion of Koshihikari cultivation due to the cultivar’s excellent taste and texture. With increasing cultivation of Koshihikari in Japan, several good agronomic characteristics beyond its high eating quality became apparent, such as its good adaptation to different environments, tolerance to pre-harvest sprouting, and cold tolerance during the booting stage. These characteristics outweigh drawbacks such as its low blast resistance and low lodging resistance. The popularity of Koshihikari influenced subsequent rice breeding trends at regional agricultural experimental stations, and the characteristics of newly developed rice cultivars in Japan are usually rated relative to Koshihikari, which is used as the benchmark. Koshihikari was the first japonica rice cultivar whose whole genome has been sequenced by means of next-generation sequencing. Furthermore, comparison of the genomes of Koshihikari and Nipponbare has provided detailed insights into the genetic diversity of Japanese rice cultivars relative to that in rice populations elsewhere in the world. Further progress in rice genomics is gradually unlocking the mechanisms that underlie the agronomic characteristics of Koshihikari. To support both research and the development of novel rice cultivars, a series of isogenic and near-isogenic lines in the Koshihikari genetic background have been continuously developed. These new findings and materials will facilitate genomics-assisted rice breeding, eventually leading to superior cultivars.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12284-018-0207-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Landraces of temperate japonica rice have superior alleles for improving culm strength associated with lodging resistance

“…3). However, the lodging resistance of "Koshihikari", which is the leading cultivar in Japan, is low because it has long culms 23 . Moreover, most cultivars bred www.nature.com/scientificreports/ from "Koshihikari" are genetically close each other and have little improvement in lodging resistance 24 , so even improvement of lodging resistance by shortening plant height is not sufficient.…”

A High-Yielding Rice Cultivar “Takanari” Shows No N Constraints on CO2 Fertilization

“…In the present study, we focused on the following two cultivars with contrasting yield potential and appearance quality: Takanari, a high-yielding indica cultivar (Imbe et al, 2004) and Koshihikari, a standard japonica cultivar (Kobayashi et al, 2018). Takanari has several favorable traits under E-[CO 2 ], including greater photosynthetic capacity (Chen et al, 2014), biomass, and grain yield (Hasegawa et al, 2013), and better appearance quality (Zhang et al, 2015a) with little increase in water use (Ikawa et al, 2018) compared to Koshihikari.…”

“…Takanari has several favorable traits under E-[CO 2 ], including greater photosynthetic capacity (Chen et al, 2014), biomass, and grain yield (Hasegawa et al, 2013), and better appearance quality (Zhang et al, 2015a) with little increase in water use (Ikawa et al, 2018) compared to Koshihikari. Koshihikari has been a dominant rice cultivar in Japan for more than 50 years, accounting for more than a third of the rice planted area of the country (Kobayashi et al, 2018). Koshihikari has an intermediate response to E-[CO 2 ] in key traits such as yield (Hasegawa et al, 2013), grain appearance quality (Usui et al, 2014) and grain nutritional quality (Myers et al, 2014) and so can serve as an appropriate check cultivar for the study.…”

Characterization of QTLs and Candidate Genes for Days to Heading in Rice Recombinant Inbred Lines

“…Two japonica rice cultivars, Koshihikari with high eating quality [ 15 ] and Baegilmi with early maturity [ 14 ], were used in this study. Days to heading (DH) and grain filling rates of the two cultivars were evaluated at the experimental field of the National Institute of Crop Science (NICS), Suwon, Korea (37°27′ N 126°99′ E) in 2014.…”