Activation Tagging Identifies Helicases and GRAS Transcription Factors as Potential Candidate Genes for Orchestrating Stress Tolerance in Rice

Abstract

Rice is a crop plant that loves to sustain itself in adequate levels of water on the field. About 1400 litres of water is required to produce 1Kg rice on average. 75% of the total water resource and 34-43% of total irrigation water worldwide is utilized solely for rice production (Laha et al., 2017). The green revolution caused a boom in rice production in many nations between 1940 and 1960 but continued population increase, and shortage of land and water resources imposed a challenge to its sustainability. For example, around 20% of rice cultivated area faces moderate to severe water stress during the cultivation period. Drought stress at any period of a rice life cycle, especially during the reproductive stage, can cause significant yield loss. Additionally, demand of rice is expected to increase by 70% in the next 30 years (Laha et al., 2017; Muthayya et al., 2014). Therefore, the development of varieties resistant to abiotic stresses like drought is an urgent requirement to meet snowballing demand of rice. Recent advances in the genome based research like the development of transgenic approaches, availability of high quality genome sequence, and rice transformation protocols provide ample opportunities for identifying and characterizing novel genes and integrate them for developing stress tolerant varieties of rice (Mottaleb et al., 2012).