Microarray For Drought Tolerance In Rice

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is an important annual, self-pollinated, diploid crop belonging to family Gramineae. It is most important cereal crop of the world and the primary source of food and calories for about half of mankind. But, rice is sensitive to number of biotic and abiotic factors. Abiotic factors like drought, high salinity and low temperature are the most common environmental stress factors which have an adverse effect on its productivity. Microarray is a very important molecular biology technique to identify the drought responsive genes in rice which will stand out as a repertoire of genes for the development of new transgenic varieties of rice against diverse abiotic stresses. The present study can be used to determine the differentially expressed genes between sensitive and tolerant rice genotypes using Agilent Rice Array (4x44k) and to identify drought responsive genes in tolerant genotype through bioinformatics tools.