Abstract

Rice floral organs are closely related to rice yield and quality, and MADS family genes play an important role in rice floral organ development. In this study, we identified functions of two MADS genes in floral organ development by bioinformatics analysis and CRISPR/Cas9 technology. Our results showed that MADS6 and MADS17 were a pair of highly homologous genes, which had highly similar sequences, motifs and expression profiles. The floral organs of mads6 and mads6/17 mutants were abnormal, whereas mads17 mutants showed no difference with wild type. Collectively, these results reveal that there are functional differentiations between conserved gene MADS6 and MADS17. Our findings provide a theoretical basis for further analysing the function of MADS family homologous genes and unravelling their molecular mechanism and regulatory network.