Genetic Analysis and Mapping of a Novel Short Root Hair Gene OsSRH3 in Rice

Root hair is an important organ for uptaking nutrients and water in plant. A rice (Oryza sativa L.) mutant, ossrh3, with short root hairs was isolated from a T-DNA insertion mutant library of rice on Zhonghua 11 background. The elongation of root hairs in the mutant was severely impaired. Beside, some other traits were also affected, such as plant height, primary root length, lateral root length, and number of lateral roots. Genetic analysis indicated that the mutated phenotype was controlled by a single recessive nuclear gene. An F₂ population was developed by crossing the mutant ossrh3 with an indica cultivar, Kasalath, to map the gene. Using simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers and newly designed sequence-tagged site (STS) markers, the target gene, OsSRH3, was located to a 37.7 kb region between markers S38978 and S39016 on chromosome 1. This marker interval contained 8 predicted genes.