Drought Tolerance in Rice: A Molecular Genetics Approach

Rice is one of the most important staple food crop providing 35-60% of the calories to 2.7 billion people across the world. Drought stress is a serious limiting factor for rice production and yield stability across rainfed rice cultivation areas. Development of cultivars with high grain yield across heterogeneous environments has been the major objective of rice breeders. Combined effects of variable environmental factors with genotypic variation for drought resistant traits genotype-by-environment (G X E) interaction for yield are generally large. Advances in molecular marker technology in combination with precision phenotyping and functional genomics will help in identification of genetic segments associated with drought tolerance in rice. Saturated genetic linkage maps in combination with precise phenotyping experiments and statistics would allow detection and characterization of genes(s) at QTL. This book present generation of EST-PCR based markers and addition of SSR markers that were effectively used for diversity analysis and map saturation and QTL identification of a DHL mapping population of rice under field drought stress.