Details for Improvement of water use efficiency in rice by expression of HARDY, an Arabidopsis drought and salt tolerance gene

Karaba A, Dixit S, Greco R, Aharoni A, Trijatmiko KR, Marsch-Martinez N, Krishnan A, Nataraja KN, Udayakumar M and Pereira A (2007). Improvement of water use efficiency in rice by expression of HARDY, an Arabidopsis drought and salt tolerance gene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 104:15270–15275 (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707294104). 

Freshwater is a limited and dwindling global resource; therefore, efficient water use is required for food crops that have high water demands, such as rice, or for the production of sustainable energy biomass. We show here that expression of the Arabidopsis HARDY (HRD) gene in rice improves water use efficiency, the ratio of biomass produced to the water used, by enhancing photosynthetic assimilation and reducing transpiration. These drought-tolerant, low-water-consuming rice plants exhibit increased shoot biomass under well irrigated conditions and an adaptive increase in root biomass under drought stress.