Functional Genomics Of Drought Stress In Grass Species

Drought has been a target of research for some decades, but complicated by drought tolerance being a quantitative trait with a complex phenotype, which is also effected by environmental and developmental changes. However recently the rapid advance of molecular biological, and functional genomics technologies has facilitated significant progress in identifying some aspects of the drought response in plants.  In this presentation we will discuss 'omics' studies, the differing capacities of genotypes of the C4 and C3 grass species to respond to various modes of drought stress. We will also discuss expression patterns at the transcriptional, post-transcriptional and post-translation levels. Research on the post-transcriptional level has specifically focused on the drought response involvement of microRNAs (miRNAs), which are small regulatory non-coding RNA molecules that have a major role in posttranscriptional regulation.