Abstract
The future of food security is being threatened by climate change. Rice is a major food crop but heat stress affects its yield and grain quality. To identify mechanistic solutions to improve rice yield under rising temperatures, molecular responses of thermotolerance must be understood. The mechanisms underlying the formation, extent, and resetting of thermotolerance and HS memories in plants is largely unknown. Transcriptional and post-transcriptional controls are involved in a wide range of plant environmental responses and recent evidence suggest they may play an important role in temperature memory. To investigate this hypothesis, our project aims to explore the transcriptome of rice cultivars contrasting for thermotolerance to investigate both basal and acquired thermotolerance responses, which will be examined with state-of-the-art analysis methods established by our team. Additionally, we will investigate the sensitivity and speed of expression and alternative splicing (AS) behaviour of key heat-sensitive genes in different heat stress conditions, as well as its regulation in rice cultivars with contrasting heat tolerance/sensitivity. Lastly, we will investigate putative heat-affected regulators of AS, selected by our preliminary analysis, by generating over-expression and loss-of-function (non-transgenic CRISPR-Cas9) lines in candidate genes, which will be monitored for heat stress phenotypes. The resulting knowledge will provide insight and strategies to rapidly advance rice breeding in response to changing environments. (AU)
| Articles published in Agência FAPESP Newsletter about the research grant: |
| More itemsLess items |
| TITULO |
| Articles published in other media outlets ( ): |
| More itemsLess items |
| VEICULO: TITULO (DATA) |
| VEICULO: TITULO (DATA) |