Systems Biology Approach to Understand the Rice Plant Metabolic and Transcriptional Regulation Under Abiotic Stress

Rice plants are exposed to a wide range of abiotic stresses during their cultivation, that seriously affects the annual global rice production. Thus, a comprehensive understanding on how rice plants respond to these changing environments both at metabolic and gene regulation levels will provide a significant insight towards improved rice varieties. To do so, we employed systems biology approach, and initially developed a core mathematical model of rice  which allows us to characterize cellular behavior and metabolic states under various abiotic stress conditions, such as i) photorespiratory pathway in rice leaves and identification of essential and lethal genes of the pathway , and ii) metabolically and transcriptionally regulated reactions and potential transcription factors involved in the regulation of coleoptile germination and elongation of rice seeds under anoxia. The core model was then further expanded to reconstruct a fully compartmentalized genome scale metabolic model. Subsequently, transcriptomics and metabolomics data were systematically integrated with the model to identify the potential transcription factors, i) in leaf, root and panicle tissues at three different developmental stages in response to drought stress , and ii) the control of light-mediated signaling mechanisms. The information derived from the current in silico analysis in conjunction with multi-omics profiling can potentially guide for developing new breeding and/or engineering targets as crop productivity strategies.