Isolation and Characterization of the Rice FOX Lines Showing Tolerance to High-Salinity Stress

Abstract

To isolate useful genes from rice by FOX Hunting System, Arabidopsis was transformed using a library of Agrobacterium that has about 13,000 of ruce full-length cDNAs in expression vector. More than 20,000 lines of transgenic plants (rice FOX lines) were screened for high-salinity tolerance by sowing T2 seeds on agar medium containing 150 mM NaCl. As a result, 208 lines were isolated as candidates of high-salinity tolerant lines. Rice cDNA inserted in 181 lines were revealed by gPCR. So far, the isolated 17 cDNAs were introduced in Arabidopsis and 12 retransformed lines showed high-salinity tolerance. R07047 is a line isolated as a high-salinity tolerant line. A rice cDNA for a protein with C2 domain was inserted in R07047 genome. R07047 also showed improved tolerance to osmotic and drought stresses. This work is supported by the Special coordination funds for Promoting Science and Technology.