RESEARCH ARTICLE t

it n1 r m tin rs r-p ic are directly associated with rice yield in the agricultural during the anther dehiscence. Ling et al. BMC Genomics (2015) 16:101 DOI 10.1186/s12864-015-1305-ybased on Agilent 44 K microarray or Affymetrix rice genome array showed that most rice genes were Wuhan 430070, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleproduction. The key role of male sterility in rice heter-osis spurred people to investigate the regulatory mech-anism of pollen development [3]. Therefore, rice anther and pollen development is an active area of research plant reproduction and crop breeding. Anther development in rice was divided into 14 stages, which was consistent with that of Arabidopsis [2,4]. To summarize, anther Genome-wide expression analysis during rice anther development could help establish regulatory networks, and further analysis that investigates co-expressed gene groups may help identify DNA cis-elements and their interacting protein factors. In recent years, several tran-scriptome analyses of rice male reproductive organs were reported [5-8]. These transcriptomic studies using high density microarrays revealed the complexity of gene expression during anther development. The studies * Correspondence