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Enhancement of Drought Tolerance in Rice through Introgressiovn of Arabidopsis DREB1A through Transgenic Approach

Chaitanya Kumar Geda, Sai Krishna Repalli, Gautam Kumar Dash, Padmini Swain and GJN Rao

With global temperatures on the raise, drought stress is turning out to be the major impediment to increase in rice production all over the world. In India, where 60% of the rice lands are rain-fed, rice production is severely hampered by drought as the crop depends heavily on monsoon rains. In this context, we attempted to incorporate tolerance against drought in Indica rice through introgression of AtDREB1A gene from Arabidopsis employing Agrobacterium mediated transgenic approach. Putative transgenics were generated and the presence of the incorporated gene was confirmed through Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and Southern blotting assays. The inheritance pattern of the incorporated gene was Mendelian. The physiological studies conducted on eight transgenic lines revealed that introduced gene could confer significantly higher levels of tolerance to drought stress. This promising result suggests that transgenic approach can be a viable option for genetic enhancement of rice against abiotic stresses like drought.