Abstract
To identify rice genes that confer tolerance to environmental stresses, we are taking advantage of FOX Hunting System. In terms of physiology, abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, heat or cold stress, provoke overlapping responses in plants, indicating the mechanisms of tolerance to these environmental stresses may share the same machinery. In this study, we are planning to perform two types of screening. The first one is "comprehensive FOX hunting" (c-FOX), where transgenic rice lines containing rice full-length cDNA are screened at T0 and/or T1 generations under salinity stress condition. We attempt to screen 2232 T1 transgenic lines, kindly provided by NIAS, and 215 independent T0 lines. The second strategy is "targeted FOX hunting" (t-FOX), for which 100 candidate genes (TOP100) are pre-selected based on the previous studies using multiple plant species, and used for examination resources to test whether overexpression of those genes confers stress tolerance under various environmental conditions. We are also evaluating existing rice cultivars with higher stress tolerance, to test as a host plant for further combinational analysis of the selected FOX genes.
