Knocking Out the Transcription Factor OsNAC092 Promoted Rice Drought Tolerance

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Rice is one of the most globally important food crops. More than half of the world’s population depends on rice as a source of food. In recent years, with the deterioration of the ecological environment and the frequent occurrence of extreme weather, drought, high temperature, cold damage, salinity, and other stress factors have become increasingly prominent, seriously affecting rice production. Drought is one of the factors that seriously affects the growth and yield of rice. After cross breeding, molecular breeding slowly stepped onto the historical stage. Our experiment aimed to study the gene function of members of the transcription family, thus providing ideas and theoretical support for molecular breeding under stress. ABSTRACT: Environmental drought stress threatens rice production. Previous studies have reported that related NAC (NAM, ATAF1/2, and CUC) transcription factors play an important role in drought stress. Herein, we identified and characterized OsNAC092, encoding an NAC transcription factor that is highly expressed and induced during drought tolerance. OsNAC092 knockout lines created using the clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-associated protein 9 (Cas9) system exhibited increased drought resistance in rice. RNA sequencing showed that the knockout of OsNAC092 caused a global expression change, and differential gene expression is chiefly associated with “response to light stimulus,” “MAPK signaling pathway,” “plant hormone signal transduction,” “response to oxidative stress,” “photosynthesis,” and “water deprivation.” In addition, the antioxidants and enzyme activities of the redox response were significantly increased. OsNAC092 mutant rice exhibited a higher ability to scavenge more ROS and maintained a high GSH/GSSG ratio and redox level under drought stress, which could protect cells from oxidant stress, revealing the importance of OsNAC092 in the rice’s response to abiotic stress. Functional analysis of OsNAC092 will be useful to explore many rice resistance genes in molecular breeding to aid in the development of modern agriculture.