RESEARCH ARTICLE Single-base resolution ma wild rice methylomes and t i

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleBackground DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification mechan-ism that plays essential roles in diverse biological pro-cesses [1]. It has also been proposed to be an alternative inheritance system playing an important role in evolution [2,3], as many case studies in plants and animals have revealed that differentially methylated alleles could create heritable phenotypic changes across generations [4-10], including some agronomically important traits in rice [11]. Recently, single-base resolution methylome maps of a dicot plant (Arabidopsis thaliana), human and silkworm have been successfully generated by whole-genome se-quencing bisulfite-treated genomic DNA using next-generation sequencing technology (BS-Seq), which revealed more elaborate patterns and functional effects of DNA methylation at the whole-genome level [12-15]. Rice is not only one of the most important crops as the primary food source for more than half of the world’s popu