CYTOPLASMIC INHERITANCE IN RICE GRAIN SHATTERING

Rice production in Africa and the world in general has reached a stage where its need is felt like never before. Demand for the grain far exceeds production in recent times, especially in sub-Sahara Africa. Thus, there is the need to find a way to maximize the production of the crop. Ways to prevent pre-harvest and post-harvest losses of the crop must be taken seriously in order to increase the amount of the grains farmers produce. Grain shattering is one of the problems associated with pre-harvest losses of rice. Many genes have been discovered to play key roles in rice grain shattering. We performed an experiment to find the behaviour of the grain shattering gene by studying the expression of the shattering trait in F1 plants generated from parental reciprocal crosses. The result of this work revealed a highly significant difference (P<0.01) between the F1 plants in terms of percentage grain shattering. This is an indication that, apart from the nuclear genes responsible for major expression of the rice grain shattering trait, cytoplasmic genes, probably located in the mitochondria or chloroplast or both, could also influence the expression of the grain shattering trait in rice.