Life Sciences & Biotechnology
Title : | Ploidy manipulation for developing abiotic stress tolerant neo-tetraploid rice and enhancing wide hybridization efficiency |
Area of research : | Life Sciences & Biotechnology |
Focus area : | Crop Improvement |
Principal Investigator : | Dr. Mridul Chakraborti, ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Cuttack, Odisha |
Timeline Start Year : | 2024 |
Timeline End Year : | 2027 |
Contact info : | mriduliari@gmail.com |
Details
Executive Summary : | Rice breeding has been subjected to extensive innovations and still scientists explore novel avenues to meet future challenges of changing climate and rising demands from ever enhancing population. One such latest development is autotetraploid rice with better yield, heterosis, nutritional quality and abiotic stress tolerance. After a roadblock of 60 years, the technology has now met success in China through development of new generation tetraploids in last decade and is in the path of reaching farmers' fields. Due to hypomethylation in genome, tetraploid rice can tolerate salinity stress better than their diploid counterparts. Beside this, phenotypic effect of sub1 gene is dosage dependent and tetraploidy can create four copies of the gene in rice and may provide better tolerance to submergence stress. However, such efforts to systematically develop fertile tetraploid rice as future stress tolerant cultivars has never been taken up in India. In addition to developing tetraploid rice cultivars, ploidy manipulation can be used as an effective strategy to enhance the efficiency of wide hybridization. Wild species of rice harbour valuable genes and alleles for imparting climate resilience. Among the wild Oryza species, O. coarctata is the only halophyte and may contribute novel genes and alleles towards salinity tolerance. Efforts to hybridize diploid rice with O. coarctata could never produce fertile or even partially fertile progenies. Recently researchers from Bangladesh have reported production of partially fertile progenies by hybridizing tetraploid rice and O. coarctata. Population development is considered as routine work in case of cultivated diploid rice. On the contrary, lack of fertile progenies in early generations is the critical limiting factor with distant interspecific hybrids. The project attempts to overcome that limiting factor through ploidy manipulations besides exploring the potential of tetraploid rice to better tolerate the stresses caused by salinity and submergence. We will also explore the scope of enhancing the hybridization success O. meyeriana by using autotetraploid O. sativa and diploid as well as tetraploid O. meyeriana. |
Co-PI: | Dr. Koushik Chakraborty, ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Cuttack, Odisha, Dr. Kutubuddin Ali Molla, ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Cuttack, Odisha |
Total Budget (INR): | 36,44,697 |
Organizations involved