Chinese scientists found that High Expression Arabidopsis WRKY57 Gene in rice could dramatically improve the tolerance of rice to drought and salt stress. This research result has been published on ThePlant Journal.

Drought is one of the important environmental factors which limits the yield and quality of crops, but the under lyingmole cular mechanism of the drought tolerance need yet to be uncovered.

Yanjuan JIANG, the associate professor of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of CAS, introduced that WRKY genefamily is a kind of typical gene family which encodes the transcriptionregulator. There are 74 members in Arabidopsis and 102 members in rice. Lots ofresearches proved that member in WRKY gene family played an important role inregulating the reaction to drought stress and the establishment of signal transduction pathway in plants.

Aresearch team led by researcher Di YU from XishuangbannaTropical Botanical Garden of CAS has being devoted to the research on rice drought resistant ability in recent years. In a preliminary study, the scientists found that the activation and expression of WRKY57 genes in Arabidopsis could extremely improve the tolerance of rice to drought and salt stress.Based on such tips, the scientist put forward that they could improve the crop drought resistantability through transgene. Through the expression of WRKY57 genes in rice andthe simulation of drought and high-salt environment, the scientists found that transgenic rice could survive in drought environment in which the relative soilmoisture content was only 22% (the growth of rice requires that the soilmoisture content exceeds 90%), or the survival rate can reach 100% in 175 millmole sodium chloride environment. Jiang said that through improving the scavenging activity to excess ROS (Reactive Oxygen Species) and promoting the expression of stress related genes, the WRKY57 genes could improve the rice drought resistant ability.

Time: 2016.2.25

Source: www.news.cn