Transcriptomics Applied to Rice Grain Quality

Abstract

Rice is a species of tremendous importance for food security worldwide, being an important part not only of peoples’ nutrition but also of their culture, especially in Asia. Rice productivity has increased enormously in recent years with plants of tremendous yield potential, but it is important to consider the need to maintain the quality of these grains. Yet this study can be quite complex, since the concept of quality is closely linked to temporal and cultural factors. Quality can have different meanings when we consider the opinion of different actors that are part of the rice production chain, after all, rice for the consumer means “food,” while for a farmer, rice may mean “part of a business.” Thus, here we highlight the importance of the decomposition of the concept of quality in different characteristics, highlighting the current research needs, which goes through the union of different fields of knowledge, with a special emphasis in transcriptomics, the first level of the interaction between genes and the environment. Thus, we highlight a little of what is currently being studied in this field and what we consider to be necessary for the future and describe the basics of microarray analysis and RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) and also of targeted expression through real-time quantitative PCR, offering links to useful materials for the execution of these analyses for the study of quality of rice grains.