Production of abiotic stress-tolerant transgenic rice plants

The production of abiotic stress-tolerant transgenic crops is a challenging task as these stresses elicit complex cellular responses. Recently, some success has been achieved in tobacco and Arabidopsis. A method to genetically transform rice using Agrobacterium tumefaciens has been optimized with relatively high efficiency. Further, transgenic rice plants have been produced that overexpress the gus reporter gene, Arabidopsis heat shock 101 (hsp101) gene, and rice pyruvate decarboxylase 1 (pdc1) gene. The integration of the transgenes has been verified by polymerase chain reaction and Southern blotting and work on the physiological and genetic behavior of the introduced genes is in progress. Gene silencing has been noted in one of the lines transformed with the gus gene. We are attempting to isolate novel stress-responsive rice genes through analysis of stress and differential screening of rice cDNA libraries.