Potential of rice tillering for sustainable food production.

Tillering, also known as shoot branching, is a fundamental trait for cereal crops such as rice to produce sufficient panicle numbers. Effective tillering, which guarantees successful panicle production, is essential for achieving high crop yields. Recent advances in molecular biology have revealed the molecular mechanisms underlying rice tillering. However, in rice breeding and cultivation, there remain limited genes or alleles suitable for effective tillering and high yields. A recently identified quantitative trait locus (QTL) called MP3 has been cloned as a single gene and shown to promote tillering and moderately increase the panicle number. This gene is an ortholog of the maize domestication gene, TB1, and increases grain yield under ongoing climate change and nutrient-poor environments. Therefore, the potential and importance of tillering for sustainable food production are reconsidered in this review, which provides an overview of rice tiller development, the currently understood molecular mechanism focused primarily on the biosynthesis and signaling of strigolactones (SLs), effective QTLs, along with the importance of MP3 (TB1). In addition, the possible future challenges in using promising QTLs such as MP3 to explore agronomic solutions under ongoing climate change and nutrient-poor environments are highlighted.