Understanding salinity responses and adopting ‘omics-based’ approaches to generate salinity tolerant cultivars of rice

Soil salinity is one of the main constraints affecting production of rice worldwide, by reducing growth, pollen viability as well as yield of the plant. Therefore, detailed understanding of the response of rice towards soil salinity at the physiological and molecular level is a prerequisite for its effective management. Various approaches have been adopted by molecular biologists or breeders to understand the mechanism for salinity tolerance in plants and to develop salt tolerant rice cultivars. Genome wide analysis using ‘omics-based’ tools followed by identification and functional validation of individual genes is becoming one of the popular approaches to tackle this task. On the other hand, mutation breeding and insertional mutagenesis has also been exploited to obtain salinity tolerant crop plants. This review looks into various responses at cellular and whole plant level generated in rice plants toward salinity stress thus, evaluating the suitability of intervention of functional genomics to raise stress tolerant plants. We have tried to highlight the usefulness of the contemporary ‘omics-based’ approaches such as genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics and phenomics towards dissecting out the salinity tolerance trait in rice. In addition, we have highlighted the importance of integration of various ‘omics’ approaches to develop an understanding of the machinery involved in salinity response in rice and to move forward to develop salt tolerant cultivars of rice.