Developing Rice with Increased Resistance to Salinity and Drought

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Food production needs to be expanded drastically to feed an ever growing human population. Drought and saline soils are two environmental conditions that greatly depress agricultural production around the globe and it is estimated that around 20-30% of rice yield is lost in areas where these stresses are prevalent. To limit such losses, it is imperative that we develop rice varieties that are more resistant to these stresses, either through breeding or by using engineering. Both breeding and engineering approaches require knowledge about the genes that contribute to tolerance. Not only will that help us understand the molecular mechanisms that plants use to respond to stress, the accumulation of such 'positive' genes will enhance rice resilience to drought and salinity. In this project we propose to use a technique called GWAS (genome wide association studies) to identify (new) genes and variations in genes (alleles) that are important in rice drought and salt tolerance. In contrast to previous work, we use very specific traits when we carry out GWAS to maximise our confidence that we are targeting the right genes. We will further confirm the relevance of the identified alleles by analysing their function, for example via deletion and subsequent characterisation of the 'knock out' plant. After these stringent 'quality controls' the positive alleles will be introduced into existing, high yielding varieties that are commonly grown in Vietnam and the Philippines. Introduction can be achieved via molecular breeding (crossing plants), a well established but very time consuming process. In parallel, we plan to use state of the art genetic engineering which will greatly accelerate the process which is important because there are many beneficial alleles that need to be transferred. The introduction of these modern engineering, or 'genome editing', techniques is also vital because it avoids the drawbacks of genetically modified organisms which have low public acceptance.