Perennial rice different distantly related perennials in the hopes that at least one of these strategies would enable genes from the perennial to be moved to the cultivated rice gene pool. Hu Fengyi, now deputy director of the Food Crops Institute at YAAS, worked on the IRRI perennial-rice project and was senior author of the paper that first reported on mapping of genes for rhizome production in rice. Using the F2 population derived from the Oryza sativa/O. longistaminata cross, two dominant-complimentary genes, rhz2 and rhz3 controlling rhizomatousness were mapped. These were found to correspond with two QTLs associated with rhizomatousness in the
Plant genome assembly products were used to clone remaining gaps, and YACs allowed the characterization of telomere sequences. The resulting sequenced regions were 115.4 Mb of the 125 Mb predicted size of the genome and a total of 25,498 of protein-coding genes. To sequence and assemble the genome of Oryza Sativa (japonica), the same strategy was used. For Oryza Sativa a total of 3,401 mapped clones in a minimum tiling path were selected from the physical map and assembled. One of the most important crops in the world, maize (Zea mays), is the last plant genome project primarily based on Sanger BAC-by-BAC strategy.