Deciphering the enigmatic spikelet traits:Resolving trade-offs for enhancing rice yield

Increasing the yield is one of the most important goals of crop improvement.Since the beginning of rice cultivation thousands of years ago,many efforts have been made to increase rice yield.One of the successes in this history was the Green Revolution.This tremendous improvement in the 1960s was achieved by increasing rice and wheat production through the development and widespread adoption of semi-dwarf varieties with the extensive use of fertilizers(Hedden,2003).Dwarfism in crops lowers the center of gravity of the plant body,reducing the risk of lodging and enabling farmers to use more fertilizer to increase yields.Semi-dwarf mutations in both rice and wheat created during the Green Revolution are related to the plant growth hormone gibberellin(GA).Although other mechanisms cause dwarf mutants,only GA-related semi-dwarf mutants were selected during the Green Revolution(Wang et al.,2021).While GA-related abnormalities only make plants shorter,most cases caused by other mechanisms involve not only dwarfism but also other morphological abnormalities.