Chinese scientists discover gene that improves rice drought resistance

Xinhua News Agency, Kunming, February 25 (Reporter Yue Ranran) Chinese scientists have found that high expression of the Arabidopsis WRKY57 gene in rice can significantly improve rice tolerance to drought and high-salinity stress. The research results were recently published in the international journal Frontiers in Plant Science.

Drought is one of the important environmental factors limiting crop yield and quality, but the underlying molecular mechanisms of plant drought tolerance remain unclear internationally.

According to Jiang Yanjuan, first author of the paper and associate researcher at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the WRKY gene family is a typical gene family encoding transcriptional regulatory factors, with 74 and 102 members in the "model plant" Arabidopsis and rice respectively. A large number of studies have demonstrated that members of the WRKY gene family play an extremely important regulatory role in plant responses to drought stress and in the establishment of their signal transduction pathways.

In recent years, the research team led by researcher Yu Diqiu at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has been devoted to research on rice drought resistance. In preliminary research, scientists found that activated expression of the WRKY57 gene in Arabidopsis can significantly improve Arabidopsis tolerance to drought and high salinity. This gave scientists a hint: could transgenic technology be used to improve the drought resistance of crops? Therefore, in further in-depth research, scientists highly expressed the Arabidopsis WRKY57 gene in rice, then carried out simulated drought and high-salinity stress treatments, and found that the survival rate of transgenic rice could reach 100% in a drought environment where the relative soil water content was only 22% (rice growth requires soil water content exceeding 90%), or in a 175 mmol sodium chloride environment.

Jiang Yanjuan said: "The experimental results prove that high expression of the Arabidopsis WRKY57 gene in rice can significantly improve rice tolerance to drought, high salinity and polyethylene glycol. On the one hand, this is achieved by enhancing rice's ability to scavenge excess reactive oxygen species; on the other hand, it promotes the expression of stress-related genes, jointly improving rice drought resistance."

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences "Light of West China" program, and the Yunnan Province "Innovative Research Team." (End)