Executive Summary : | Rice cultivation faces significant challenges due to multiple abiotic stresses, which can occur simultaneously or one after another during different stages of crop growth. Climate change increases the incidence of multiple abiotic stresses during a single cropping season. The mechanism of tolerance for these stresses differs significantly in the case of simultaneous exposure to two or more stresses compared to individual stress. The complex mechanism of tolerance of individual stresses is often governed by polygenic traits, making it difficult to introgress all such traits in a single background through conventional approaches. To identify common genes for multiple abiotic stresses, researchers have identified a unique rice germplasm, AC39416A, from the backwater regions of Kerala, which showed tolerance to multiple abiotic stresses, including salinity, anaerobic germination, stagnant flooding, and saline water flooding. This diversity of stress tolerance abilities in a single genetic background is valuable for working on the detailed mechanism of tolerance. The researchers have identified putative novel genes (TFs, genes related to epigenetic changes, and unannotated genes showing strong differential expression) that showed consistent up/downregulations under all stress conditions in AC39416A. They have also developed stable recombinant inbred lines (RIL) using AC39416A as one of the parent lines to verify the effectivity of these putative genes. The proposed study aims to narrow down putative genes/TFs after validating transcriptome data in RILs and target a few genes to create loss of function mutants. The goal is to identify one or few master regulators that help impart tolerance to a range of abiotic stresses, potentially generating valuable knowledge on the regulatory network for multiple abiotic stress tolerance in rice. |