Yinping Jiao

INTRODUCTION Mutants are critical and highly valuable to plant biology research and crop breeding. Applications and deployments of mutants have increasingly grown in conjunction with genomics. Mutation breeding is a technique used to develop new crop varieties by inducing genetic changes or mutations in crops.

Inflorescence tissues at five stages (from meristem to immature spikelets) were collected from greenhouse-grown plants and processed for scanning electron microscopy47. To visualize the floral organs in SS and PS, SS and PS were collected from BTx623 and the msd1-1 mutant at stage 4 and cleared by fixing in FAA (50% ethanol, 1% formaldehyde, and 0.5% acetic acid) overnight at 4?°C.

Maize is the most productive and widely grown crop in the world, as well as a foundational model for genetics and genomics5. An accurate genome assembly for maize is crucial for all forms of basic and applied research, which will enable increases in yield to feed the growing world population. The current assembly of the maize genome, based on Sanger sequencing, was first published in 2009 (ref. 3).