Characterization and Genetic Analysis of Rumpled and Twisted Leaf Mutant (rtl1) in Rice

A rumpled and twisted leaf 1 (rtl1) mutant was generated from a japonica cultivar Nipponbare by ethyl methanesulfonate treatment, which was characterized as rumpled and twisted leaf at the seedling stage. The F2 populations were constructed by crossing with indica cultivars TN1 and Zhefu 802, respectively. Genetic analysis demonstrated that the phenotype was controlled by a single recessive nuclear gene. The closely linked simple sequence repeat (SSR) marker RM1155 was obtained from bulked segregant analysis. Subsequently, sequence tagged site (STS) markers were developed using the published rice genome sequence. Finally, RTL1 was located between an STS marker T1591 and an SSR marker RM1359, at the distances of 0.48 cM and 0.96 cM, respectively. These results will facilitate the cloning of the target gene in further studies.