Transcriptional profiling of indica rice cultivar FR13A under salt stress condition.

A submergence tolerant indica rice cultivar FR13A, was also reported to withstand salt stress and proven in our experiments. The mechanism of tolerance is yet to be studied by forward genetics approach. However, it is known that salt stress tolerance is governed by several QTLs and not by a single gene. To understand the mechanism of such a complex mechanism of salt tolerance we selected, two indica rice genotypes namely, I) FR13A, a tolerant indica variety and ii) IR24, a susceptible genotype for this study. We used the 22K rice Oligoarray from Agilent technologies to study the transcript profile in the leaves of the two contrasting rice genotypes under constitutive and salt stress conditions at seedling stage. Keywords: Mechanism of salt tolerance Overall design: We used Agilent rice gene chips (G4138A) to investigate the transcript level changes in rice plant tissues during salt stress treatment. We used two contrasting rice genotypes (FR13A tolerant and IR24 susceptible) differing in salt stress response. Plants were grown in growth chambers and treated with 150 mM salt concentration at 14th DAS. Sampling was done in both constitutive and treated plants at 3 time points. Two replications of microarray experiments were carried out by hybridizing the RNA from tolerant samples against the susceptible lines on the same slide.