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.