In the study presented here, the 16 primers were selected to generate AFLP profiles of strains 971ck and 971-5 because of the ability to detect the existence of differential bands between them (data not shown), but, theoretically,the 16 primers were randomly distributed throughout the whole rice genome and should image the global genomic changes of any rice mutant. According to our results, the degree of mutation varied among different strains of rice. With the primer combinations that we used, 54 mutation sites were identified in strain 971-5, 86 in strain
972-4, and 5 in R955 compared to their controls, with mutation rates of 4.3%, 6.9% and 0.4% for the three mutants, respectively.