Abstract
Rice is an important staple food crop across the world. It is mainly cultivated under irrigated lowland and also rain-fed upland conditions where drought stress is often noticed. Global climate change predicts an intensification of drought stress in future due to uneven rainfall which was witnessed for the last few years. Confronting drought stress can deliver fruitful crop returns in rice and scope for research extents. Drought stress affects the overall plant growth and yield. A prominent improvement has been made during last two decades in our understanding of the mechanisms involved in adaptation and tolerance to drought stress in rice. In order to achieve the marked crop returns from rainfed areas, there is a requisite of drought tolerant rice varieties, and genetic improvement for drought tolerance should be a prime area of concern in the future. A huge rice germplasm is available and good number of the germplasm possess drought tolerance and these genomic regions have been exploited in developing some drought tolerant rice varieties. The application of available genotyping methodologies, the identification of traits of interest, and key genetic regions associated with the drought tolerance have opened new prospects to successfully develop new drought tolerant varieties. This chapter deals with the importance of drought tolerance in rice crop followed by the evolution of molecular markers and breeding techniques in identifying drought tolerant QTL’s/genes and their utilization in the improvement of drought tolerant rice varieties.
Highlights
Rice is a staple cereal consumed by more than half of the world’s population
RG1 Quantitative trait loci (QTL) was identified while working with 52 recombinant inbred (RI) lines (F 7), a randomly sampled subset of a population originally developed to study the genetics of resistance to rice blast (Pyricularia oryzae) [16]
Rice Restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) maps developed at Cornell University [17, 18] and Japan [19, 20] is the basis of gene mapping research
Summary
Rice is a staple cereal consumed by more than half of the world’s population. It is cultivated in wide agro-ecological conditions including rain-fed conditions where drought stress is often evident due to erratic rainfall. Drought stress was noted in approximately 42 Mha of riceproducing area [3] It is of two types, terminal and intermittent [4]. Drought stress tolerance varies among the plant species and is defined as the ability of a plant to grow, develop and produce significant yield as well as economic benefit [7]. It is defined as the ability of plant to survive at minimum water level in the fresh tissue (23%) [6]. Plants synthesize reactive oxygen species (ROS), proteins and osmolytes to maintain turgor pressure This osmotic adaptation provides dehydration tolerance to tissues [8–10]. RG1 QTL was identified while working with 52 recombinant inbred (RI) lines (F 7), a randomly sampled subset of a population originally developed to study the genetics of resistance to rice blast (Pyricularia oryzae) [16]
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