SEQUENTIAL VARIATIONS OF ABIOTIC STRESS TOLERANCE RESPONSIVE GENES IN RICE (Oryza sativa L) WITH GENE BASED MARKER APPROACHES

A. MAHENDER¹, G.J.N. RAO²*
¹Division of Crop Improvement, ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Cuttack, Odisha, 753006, India
²Division of Crop Improvement, ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Cuttack, Odisha, 753006, India
* Corresponding Author : gjnrao@gmail.com

Received : 08-11-2016     Accepted : 13-02-2017     Published : 28-02-2017
Volume : 9     Issue : 2       Pages : 237 - 243
Genetics 9.2 (2017):237-243

Keywords : Rice, Polymerase Chain Reaction, Candidate genes, Sequence alignment
Academic Editor : Dr Rajmohan Sharma
Conflict of Interest : None declared
Acknowledgements/Funding : The authors are highly grateful to the Director, ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Cuttack for providing all the necessary facilities and kind support. The research work is financially supported by National Agriculture Innovative Project Component-4 (C30033)
Author Contribution : AM and GJN conceived the idea and designed the experiments. Performed the experiments by AA. The article written by GJN and AA

Rice (Oryza sativa L) is one the most important and widely cultivated food crops of the world, particularly for South Asian countries. Considering the detrimental effect of drought, salinity and low/ high temperature stress on rice yield, efforts have been initiated in the direction of developing abiotic stress tolerant crops through a combination of conventional and modern genomic technologies to sustain rice production in these adverse environmental conditions. The present study, focused on the identification tolerance genes and allelic variations of the candidate genes, will be of great use in management of stresses in rice. Through a comprehensive literature search of NCBI and RAP-DB databases, 12 abiotic stress tolerance genes were selected and all the genes under study were functionally validated genes and reported to play significant role in conferring tolerance to drought and salinity stresses in rice. Based on phenotypic characterization in drought and salinity stress environments, 14 rice accessions were selected for sequencing analysis and the polymorphism of these selected genes was studied using Nippon bare sequence as reference. In PCR assay, polymorphism was detected with six gene based marker while with other six markers, no polymorphism was seen. Sequence alignment analyses indicate differences at nucleotide level at different positions of these stress tolerance genes. The phylogenetic tree generated based on nucleotide sequences, clearly established the evolutionary relationships between the tolerant and susceptible genotypes could be of great help in the development of functional markers for use in MAS programs designed to enhance the level of tolerance against different stresses in rice