Breeding for Parents of Hybrid Rice with Maize pepc Gene

The results of the investigation on transgenic rice with maize C4-specific phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase (pepc) gene showed that the transgenic rice plants with the maize pepc gene expressed at high level and the maize PEPC expression was inherited in the progenies in a Mendelian manner. The transgenic plants had PEPC activity of more than 10-fold higher than untransformed plants. As compared with untransformed plants, the panicle per plant, spikelet per panicle, 1000-grain weight and grain-weight per plant for transgenic plants increased by 14.9 %, 5.7%, 1.3 % and 13.9 %, respectively. By crossing the maize pepc gene was incorporated into the parents of hybrid rice, which were the photo-sensitive genic male sterile (PGMS)lines of two-line hybrid rice such as Peiai64s, 7001s, 2302s, 2304s and 2306s-1, and the BT type of cytoplasmic male sterile (CMS) line of three-line hybrid rice such as Shuangjiu A, and restorer lines 5129, Wanjing97 in the spring of 1998. The following progresses were made: (1) The inheritance of the high-level expression of the maize PEPC was stable in different genetic background of rice; (2) PEPC activity of F1 hybrid was the mean of the two parents. Its saturated photosynthetic rate (Pn) rose to 50 % higher than that of the receptor parent. These results demonstrated that it is possible to increase the vigor of the rice plant by transgenic approach with maize pepc gene; (3) The activity of PEPC in leaf could be considered as the major physiological index because the correlation coefficient between PEPC activity and Pn was 0.6470 * *; (4) We have developed three rice lines with maize pepc gene; (5) The selection method of high photosynthetic efficiency rice has been established, which includes soaking seeds into solution of hygromycin phosphotransferase to germinate, tracing the pepc gene by PCR analysis, evaluating the performance of the rice plants in the field and examining PEPC activities and Pn of rice plants with maize pepc gene.