Re-sequencing of mitochondrial genes in a standard rice cultivar Nipponbare

Background: Genomic sequence of a rice cultivar Nipponbare has been often used as a reference sequence since a whole-genomic sequence was first determined in 2005 by the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project. As for mitochondrial genomic sequence of Nipponbare, two groups have deposited their sequences into DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the accession numbers BA000029 and DQ167400. However, there are 19 discrepancies in the nucleotide sequences of 7 genes between BA000029 and DQ167400. Findings: We performed PCR to amplify these 7 genes and to perform direct sequencing. Nucleotides of the discrepant sites were all identical to those in DQ167400.1. The sequence in BA000029.3 is thought to contain sequencing errors. Conclusion: Nucleotide sequences of the mitochondrial genes in BA000029.3 need to be updated using the data in this study when used as a reference genome.