Zhongmei Hong , Wenzhong Huang

CRO Service Station, Sanya Tihitar SciTech Breeding Service Inc., Sanya, 572025, Hainan, China
Author    Correspondence author
Field Crop, 2025, Vol. 8, No. 1   
Received: 08 Jan., 2025    Accepted: 18 Feb., 2025    Published: 28 Feb., 2025

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.

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.

Drought stress; Rapeseed (Brassica napus); Transcriptome analysis; Drought tolerance genes; Gene editing technology