Identification of Drought Stress-responsive Genes in Rice by Comparative RNA-seqAnalysis

Drought stress is one of the major abiotic stresses limiting crop growth and productivity all around the world. Rice is a model plant species and a major staple food for more than half of the world’s population. Since, rice has very high- water requirements, drought is a major cause for its yield reduction [1]. Hence drought resistance has been identified as one of the key traits that needs to be improved for developing rice. Plants have evolved a series of mechanisms at the morphological, physiological, biochemical, cellular, and molecular levels to overcome water deficit or drought stress conditions [2]. Understanding molecular mechanisms of drought response is essential to select or breed new drought tolerant cultivars. The development of the next generation high- throughput sequencing technologies and availability of efficient omics tool shave shifted the attention of molecular biologists to utilize the genome annotation information via computational approaches. Since most of the biological pathways involve coordinated regulation of a large number of genes, identification of these genes provides useful information for the characterization of key genes [3,1]. Measuring expression levels of genes at the whole genome level can be useful for many purposes, especially for revealing biological pathways underlying specific phenotype conditions. When gene expression is measured over a period, we have opportunities to understand how organisms respond to stress conditions over time [4]. So in this study, we evaluate how plants respond to drought stress over a period by Investigation of gene expression profiles through RNA sequencing analysis and examining gene expression in two time points.