Rice has been chosen as the model cereal for functional genomics by the international scientific community not only because rice is a major food crop of the world but also because of its small genome ( 430 Mb which is the smallest among cereal genomes); the ease with which it can be transformed; its well understood genetics with detailed genome physical maps and dense molecular markers; and the existence of great similarities in gene sequence, gene structure, gene order and gene function among all the cereals and grasses. Genes identified in rice as being important agronomically are also...