Prof. Wan Jianmin and his colleagues at the Institute of Crop Sciences of CAAS reported the mechanism on how a rice's selfish genetic element controls hybrid sterility. A related study named "A selfish genetic element confers on rice non-Mendelian genetics" was published in Science. The study proposed that the selfish genetic system promoted differentiation between wild and cultivated rice and played an important role in maintaining genome stability. This toxicity-antidote molecular mechanism may be a common phenomenon in the control of hybrid sterility in rice. The group's findings provide a reference for studying selective hybrid sterility mechanisms between the indica and japonica subspecies of cultivated rice.

Identification of the selfish genetic element encoded by qHMS7