This device has no English text-to-speech voice, so the article may not be read aloud.
Genetic material is like the code of life, from germination to yield. Rice genetic material consists of 400 million base pairs divided into 12 parts called chromosomes, and all together called the genome. The success of decoding the rice genome has revealed the number, positions and direction of expression of genes, of which there are more than 50,000.
However, finding out what each gene does takes a great deal of experimental effort. One method is genome mapping. Once the position and role of a gene are known, breeders can use a marker representing that gene to make breeding more precise. This method is called Marker-Assisted Selection (MAS).
