The primary studies on gene expression of drought tolerance or sensitive rice cultivars in different water conditions

摘要

Plants respond and adapt to abiotic stresses to acquire stress tolerance in order to survive (Bray et al., 2000). The response of plants to abiotic stress involves hundreds of genes with different functions (Crookshanks et al., 2001). In Ambidopsis, many stress-inducible genes have been cloned and some of them have been used to improve the stress tolerance of plants by gene transfer (Yamaguchi-Shinozaki et al., 1993; Liu et al., 1998). Drought tolerance related genes and their function in indica ricehave yet to be studied thoroughly (Dubouzet et al., 2003). It is important to clone and analysis the functions of drought-inducible genes in rice, especially in drought tolerant rice, in order to understand the molecular mechanisms of drought toleranceand to further improve the drought tolerance of rice by gene manipulation. In this study, a primary effort was made to understand the expression patterns of four rice cultivars in both drought-stressed and non-stress conditions by using the mRNA differential display (mRNA DD-PCR) approach.