Field Crop 2025, Vol.8, No.1, 41-50 http://cropscipublisher.com/index.php/fc 41 Research Insight Open Access Identification of Drought-Responsive Genes in Rapeseed Through Transcriptome Profiling Zhongmei Hong, Wenzhong Huang CRO Service Station, Sanya Tihitar SciTech Breeding Service Inc., Sanya, 572025, Hainan, China Corresponding email: wenzhong.huang@hitar.org Field Crop, 2025, Vol.8, No.1 doi: 10.5376/fc.2025.08.0005 Received: 08 Jan., 2025 Accepted: 18 Feb., 2025 Published: 28 Feb., 2025 Copyright © 2025 Hong and Huang, This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Preferred citation for this article: Huang Z.M., and Huang W.Z., 2025, Identification of drought-responsive genes in rapeseed through transcriptome profiling, Field Crop, 8(1): 41-50 (doi: 10.5376/fc.2025.08.0005) Abstract The impact of drought on rapeseed is no joke. Once this important oil crop lacks water, its growth and yield will be greatly reduced. This time, we used RNA-Seq technology to carefully study the changes in gene expression of rapeseed under drought conditions and found that the situation is much more complicated than expected. Interestingly, different varieties of rapeseed cope with drought in very different ways. Some genes are busy regulating osmotic pressure, while others are particularly active in removing reactive oxygen species (ROS). We also noticed that some genes involved in signal transduction and cell structure maintenance are also critical. These findings may help us breed more drought-tolerant rapeseed varieties, but if they are really applied to breeding, they may have to combine more omics data. When it comes to practical applications, now with these transcriptome data, breeders at least know which direction to work towards. But this alone is not enough. In the future, it may be necessary to combine gene editing technology to precisely regulate key genes. After all, climate change is becoming more and more obvious, and breeding drought-tolerant crops really can't be delayed. Keywords Drought stress; Rapeseed (Brassica napus); Transcriptome analysis; Drought tolerance genes; Gene editing technology 1 Introduction Drought has a significant impact on agriculture, causing a significant reduction in crop yields every year (Bano et al., 2022). This is the biggest headache for farmers, after all, it is directly related to the problem of food (Zhang et al., 2021). However, plants are not vegetarians, they have their own set of coping methods. Studies have found that different crops respond to drought in a variety of ways (Zhang et al., 2019). Some are busy adjusting their internal moisture, while others change their growth rhythm. It is important to understand these tricks, after all, the climate is becoming more and more abnormal now (Yi et al., 2022). But to be honest, it is not that simple to completely solve the problem of drought, and it requires approaching from multiple angles. Anyone who has grown rapeseed knows that this crop is most afraid of drought. A study last year showed that a slight lack of water would cause a sharp drop in yield (Xiong et al., 2022). However, it is not completely hopeless. Breeding experts are now trying to find more drought-resistant varieties (Tan et al., 2020). A closer look will reveal that drought has an all-round impact on rapeseed. Not only will the plants not grow well, but even photosynthesis will be affected (Wang et al., 2019). The most troublesome thing is that the metabolic process is also messed up, and naturally fewer seeds are produced in the end. Therefore, when the dry season comes, farmers are particularly troubled. Seeing that the rapeseed is growing well, a drought may make all their efforts in vain. When it comes to studying how rapeseed resists drought, transcriptome analysis technology is now of great help (Chai et al., 2023). This technology is quite powerful and can help us find genes and long non-coding RNAs that are particularly active during drought (Raza et al., 2021a). However, in actual operations, the results obtained by different laboratories sometimes differ. The recent study by Yang et al. (2023) is quite interesting. They found that the gene trehalose-6-phosphate synthase (TPS) is particularly important in the process of drought resistance. But to be honest, this gene alone may not be enough, after all, drought resistance is a complex system engineering. The problem now is that although we have found some key genes and transcription factors, in order to truly apply them to breeding, we still have to clarify the relationship between these regulatory networks.
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