Plants are often exposed to biotic and abiotic stresses that affect plant growth, development, and productivity. Drought is an important abiotic stress that has a particularly serious impact on plant growth and development. We transformed rice with PsGPD using Agrobacterium-mediated transformation. We generated independent PsGPD-homozygous transgenic rice plants selected as single copy/intergenic lines by the TaqMan copy number assay and by T-DNA flanking sequences. These transgenic rice plants showed improvement of drought tolerance compared to wild-type plants under drought condition. RNA sequencing analysis showed that 2,992 genes were transcriptionally affected by the PsGPD transgene or drought treatment. In total, 145 genes were modulated by the PsGPD transgene before and after drought treatment. Among these candidate genes, 4 were up- and downregulated in all four comparisons. Several genes, including Os04t0576900, Os03t0629800, and Os04t0518400 (OsPAL7), were involved in tetrapyrrole synthesis. Os09t0522200 (DREB1A), an important component in hormone signal transduction, is a transcription factor (TF) gene that plays vital roles in stress responses. We partially characterized the functions of PsGPD in the drought stress response and the role of major TFs in the drought tolerance mechanism. These genes will be useful targets for both future research and the breeding of drought tolerance in rice.

Plant is frequently exposed to various abiotic stress. Salt stress is particularly an important abiotic stress that seriously affects plant growth and development. BrTSR53 gene, a putative stress-related gene isolated from Brassica rapa, was used to generate overexpression transgenic rice. The over-expression of BrTSR53 in BrTSR53-OX transgenic rice was confirmed by quantitative RT-PCR and western blot analysis. To elucidate the role of BrTSR53 in stress tolerance, responses of BrTSR53-OX transgenic rice plants to salt stress conditions were examined. BrTSR53-OX #12, #28, and #32 lines were treated with salt stress on MS medium containing 100 mM or 200 mM of NaCl for 5 and 14 days. Morphological analysis revealed differences between the three transgenic BrTSR53-OX rice and the wild-type rice. The germination rates of the three transgenic BrTSR53-OX lines of rice were significantly higher than that of the wild type rice, indicating that they were more tolerant to 200 mM NaCl than the wild type rice. In addition, the three transgenic BrTSR53-OX rice lines had significantly longer length of root and shoot compared to the wild type rice. These results suggest that the BrTSR53 gene played an important role in the tolerance of rice to salt stress. Therefore, it might be a potential target for the purpose of improving salt tolerance of rice and other crops.

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