Background: Eating and cooking quality have become ever more important breeding goals due to high levels of economic growth in Asia in recent decades. Cooked rice texture properties such as hardness, stickiness, and springiness are appealing to human mastication and directly reflect eating and cooking quality, and texture is strongly affected by genetic background and environmental conditions.
Results: In this study, a series of recombinant inbred lines (RILs) derived from an indica/japonica cross were planted into four typical rice-cultivated areas. The relationships between the environment, texture, and genetic background of the RILs were investigated. The results showed that hardness, stickiness, and springiness strongly correlated with amylose and protein contents. Texture was strongly affected by environmental factors, which dynamically changed from the heading to the mature stage. Interestingly, the effect of environmental factors became weaker with decreasing latitude. The hardness and stickiness increased with the decrease of latitude, whereas springiness exhibited the opposite trend. The indica pedigree percentage did not significant correlated with hardness, stickiness and springiness. We detected 19 QTLs related to hardness, stickiness, and springiness, several of which share a similar region with a previously reported locus related to starch synthesis. Moreover, we revealed that DEP1 might affect taste through regulating amylopectin chain length distribution.
Conclusions: The present study evaluated the effects of environmental factors and genetic background to texture of cooked rice. These results provide insights into the eating and cooking quality of rice, which can be improved through sub-species crosses for different ecological conditions.
Keywords: Eating and cooking quality; Environmental factor; Genetic background; Rice; Texture.