Rice Genomics in South America

Climate changes are putting pressure on agriculture systems, creating new challenges for breeders regarding the generation of resilient crops to abiotic stresses. Rice is a very important crop in South America, being Brazil the major producer in this Continent. The challenges for Rice Genomics are to develop plants that are stress resilient as well as having good nutritional value. The response to abiotic and biotic stresses occurs via a plethora of signalling pathways, where a large number of genes are induced or repressed. Among these, ERFs (Ethylene Responsive Transcription Factors) which is a large family that bind to conserved domains found in promoters of many genes involved in responses to ethylene. Our laboratory has been working on the transcriptional response of genes to different biotic and abiotic stresses such as anoxia, cold, salinity, iron overload and Magnaporthe grisea, and on the the identification of cis regulatory elements, as well as potentially methylated regions in the promoter region of these genes, trying to establish an association between promoter landscape and transcriptional profiles. When comparing cultivars in response to iron overload stress it is possible to observe an association between the presence of specific cis elements and the transcriptional expression of several genes as well as the interaction of several gene products.