Breeding and Omics Approaches to Understand Abiotic Stress Response in Rice

Abstract

AbstractRice (Oryza sativa L.) is the major sources of food and calories for more than half of the world population. Productivity of rice is adversely affected by various abiotic stresses such as salinity, drought, submergence or flooding, high and low temperatures, and heavy metal. They are also responsible for significant yield loss and threaten global food security across major rice-producing countries. Climate change has aggravated the frequency of abiotic stress and may even threaten survival of plants. By 2050, at least 50% more rice production is required to feed nine billion people. Thus, it is important to understand plants response against adverse conditions of paddy fields with the hope of improving better tolerance to environmental stress. The rice plant has comparatively smaller genome size which is useful to understand the effect of abiotic stress on the physiology, biochemistry, and genomic levels. Molecular breeding approaches had improved our basic understanding about abiotic stress tolerance in rice through identifying and introgressing major effect QTLs. On the other hand, advances in “omic” studies such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc. and genome editing tools have paved the way of identifying the causal genes and their expression patterns during the period of stress perception and response. As a whole, more combined efforts are required to develop stress tolerance crops to boost rice yield even under stress. In this chapter, we attempt to discuss the recent advances in abiotic stress tolerance in rice by exploiting molecular breeding, “omic” approaches, and modern biotechnological tools.KeywordsAbiotic stressStress toleranceMarker-assisted breedingQuantitative trait loci (QTL)Omic approachGenetic engineeringRice