A large-scale collection of phenotypic data describing an insertional mutant population to facilitate functional analysis of rice genes

In order to facilitate the functional analysis of rice genes, we produced about 50,000 insertion lines with the endogenous retrotransposon Tos17. Phenotypes of these lines in the M₂ generation were observed in the field and characterized based on 53 phenotype descriptors. Nearly half of the lines showed more than one mutant phenotype. The most frequently observed phenotype was low fertility, followed by dwarfism. Phenotype data with photographs of each line are stored in the Tos17 mutant panel web-based database with a dataset of sequences flanking Tos17 insertion points in the rice genome (http://tos.nias.affrc.go.jp/). This combination of phenotypic and flanking sequence data will stimulate the functional analysis of rice genes.