Advances in Crop Science and Technology
Open Access

Knockouts of Drought Sensitive Genes Improve Rice Grain Yield under both Drought and Well-Watered Field Conditions

Guihua Lu^1*, Changgui Wang², Guokui Wang², Guanfan Mao², Jeffrey E. Habben¹, Guangwu Chen², Min Liu, Yanlong Shi², Wei Wang², Xiping Wang², Huiting Li², Yang Gao², Pingping Qu², Hua Mo¹, Mary K. Beatty¹, H. Renee Lafitte¹, Michael W Lassner¹, Richard M Broglie¹, Junhua Liu^2* and Thomas W. Greene^1*

¹Corteva Agriscience, Trait Discovery, Johnston, Iowa, IA 50131, USA

²Sinobioway Bio-Agriculture Group, Co., Ltd., Beijing 100085, China

Received Date: May 19, 2020 / Accepted Date: Jun 04, 2020 / Published Date: Jun 12, 2020

Citation: Lu G, Wang C, Wang G, Mao G, Habben JE, et al. (2020) Knockouts of Drought Sensitive Genes Improve Rice Grain Yield under both Drought and Well-Watered Field Conditions. Adv Crop Sci Tech 8: 444.

Copyright: © 2020 Lu G et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Rice (Oryza sativa) is one of the most important staple food crops feeding more than half of the world’s population. One of the requirements for future sustainable rice production is to develop drought tolerant varieties. We have identified a number of drought sensitive tagged lines by screening our rice activation tagging population. Two of the sensitive lines, AH13391 and AH17392, exhibit reduced drought tolerance compared to the controls, and have a single T-DNA in a region next to an ATPase-associated with diverse cellular activities (AAA)-like gene, respectively. Constitutive overexpression of either AAA-like gene (OsAAA-1 and OsAAA-2) significantly reduced the drought tolerance, whereas knocking them out by CRISPR-Cas9 significantly increased grain yield under both drought and well-watered field conditions. Comparative analysis of different OsAAA-1-edited variations shows that the core AAA ATPase domain and the C-terminal end of OsAAA-1 protein are important for its function in drought sensitivity; and OsAAA genes may regulate drought sensitivity through interacting with other drought-stress responsive partners. Our results show that OsAAA genes play an important role in drought sensitivity and demonstrate the feasibility of improving drought tolerance by CRISPR-mediated knockouts of native rice drought sensitive genes.

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