Ganie Showkat Ahmad, Reddy Anireddy S N
Department of Biotechnology, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan 731235, WB, India.
Department of Biology and Program in Cell and Molecular Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA.
Biology (Basel). 2021 Apr 8;10(4):309. doi: 10.3390/biology10040309.
Improvements in yield and quality of rice are crucial for global food security. However, global rice production is substantially hindered by various biotic and abiotic stresses. Making further improvements in rice yield is a major challenge to the rice research community, which can be accomplished through developing abiotic stress-resilient rice varieties and engineering durable agrochemical-independent pathogen resistance in high-yielding elite rice varieties. This, in turn, needs increased understanding of the mechanisms by which stresses affect rice growth and development. Alternative splicing (AS), a post-transcriptional gene regulatory mechanism, allows rapid changes in the transcriptome and can generate novel regulatory mechanisms to confer plasticity to plant growth and development. Mounting evidence indicates that AS has a prominent role in regulating rice growth and development under stress conditions. Several regulatory and structural genes and splicing factors of rice undergo different types of stress-induced AS events, and the functional significance of some of them in stress tolerance has been defined. Both rice and its pathogens use this complex regulatory mechanism to devise strategies against each other. This review covers the current understanding and evidence for the involvement of AS in biotic and abiotic stress-responsive genes, and its relevance to rice growth and development. Furthermore, we discuss implications of AS for the virulence of different rice pathogens and highlight the areas of further research and potential future avenues to develop climate-smart and disease-resistant rice varieties.
提高水稻产量和品质对全球粮食安全至关重要。然而，全球水稻生产受到各种生物和非生物胁迫的严重阻碍。进一步提高水稻产量是水稻研究界面临的一项重大挑战，这可以通过培育抗非生物胁迫的水稻品种以及在高产优质水稻品种中构建持久的非化学农药依赖型病原菌抗性来实现。反过来，这需要深入了解胁迫影响水稻生长发育的机制。可变剪接（AS）是一种转录后基因调控机制，它能使转录组快速变化，并能产生新的调控机制，赋予植物生长发育可塑性。越来越多的证据表明，可变剪接在胁迫条件下调控水稻生长发育中起着重要作用。水稻的几个调控基因、结构基因和剪接因子会发生不同类型的胁迫诱导可变剪接事件，其中一些在胁迫耐受性方面的功能意义已经明确。水稻及其病原菌都利用这种复杂的调控机制来制定相互对抗的策略。本文综述了目前对可变剪接参与生物和非生物胁迫响应基因的认识和证据，以及它与水稻生长发育的相关性。此外，我们还讨论了可变剪接对不同水稻病原菌毒力的影响，并强调了进一步研究的领域以及未来培育适应气候变化和抗病水稻品种的潜在途径。
