Mueen Alam Khan

Department of Plant Breeding & Genetics, College of Agriculture & Environmental Sciences, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur- 63100, Pakistan
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2012, Vol. 3, No. 1   doi: 10.5376/mpb.2012.03.0001
Received: 20 Oct., 2011    Accepted: 02 Feb., 2012    Published: 08 Mar., 2012

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Khan et al., 2012, Current Status of Genomic based Approaches to Enhance Drought Tolerance in Rice (Oryza sativa L.), an Over View, Molecular Plant Breeding, Vol.3, No.1 1-10 (doi: 10.5376/mpb.2012.03.0001)

The availability of ample amount of water is the most limiting factor in rice production especially in drought prone areas. The yield losses due to drought in rice are enormous. Due to quantitative nature of drought tolerance, conventional breeding has met with little success. Recent progress made in the field of genomics enabling us to access genes linked with drought tolerance has enhanced our understanding of this complex phenomenon. Identification of drought related QTLs, and their use in  marker assisted breeding, transgenic rice production and evolution of genomic tools provide rice breeders a hope to build high yielding drought tolerant rice cultivars. The objective of this review is therefore to consolidate the current knowledge of molecular breeding and functional genomics which may be influential in integrating breeding and genetic engineering approaches for drought resistance in rice.

Drought tolerance; Oryza sativa L.; QTLs; Transgenics