Drought has been the single largest factor limiting rice yield and stability in many parts of Asia. Past breeding efforts to develop drought tolerance (DT) rice cultivars have not been successful largely because of the complexity of the genetic control of DT in rice. Recent efforts using molecular markers have identified many quantitative trait loci (QTL) associated with DT in rice, but most conventional QTL mapping studies do not produce sufficient genetic information about identified DT QTLs to allow an effective application of marker-assisted selection (MAS) to the genetic improvement of DT. In particular, defining a target DT QTL allele in a small genomic region by closely linked DNA markers has been one of the most challenging problems to overcome. In this study, we have developed a new strategy for highly efficient fine-mapping of important DT QTLs using overlap DT introgression lines (ILs).
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