Rice Epigenetic Research

Research Title:

Genetic and Epigenetic Characterization of Non-Nuclear DNA in Rice

Aim:

The primary aim of this research is to study the epigenetics mechanisms occur in the non-nuclear DNA of rice plants. The research aims to investigate the epigenetics characteristics found in rice mitochondrial genome across different tissues at different developmental stages of rice plants. A comparative mitochondrial epigenetics between different rice subgroups will be explored in this research as well. This research also aims to investigate the compare the epigenetics differences exist between amyloplasts and chloroplasts in rice.

Summary:

Rice, being an agricultural crop serves as a source of carbohydrate while providing essential vitamins and minerals

This changes do not involve alteration of DNA sequences. The alterations are of cellular and physiological changes that causes genes to switch on or off to influence the gene expression (Eichten, Schmitz & Springer 2014). At the same time, epigenetics also study the changes occur at the genome itself without no changes in the DNA sequences (Minocherhomji, Tollefsbol & Singh 2012). The two well-known epigenetics mechanisms are DNA methylation and histone modification. DNA methylation is a scenario where the nucleotides in a gene region are heavily methylated preventing transcription (Boyko & Kovalchuk 2010). The gene expression will be low. Hence, proteins are produced in lesser amount or none at all. The phenomenon is often spotted at CpG nucleotides. Histone modification whereas is the post-translational modification of amino acids that make up the histone proteins such as lysine and arginine (Schübeler et al. 2004). The altered histone proteins will also change the way the DNA being structured. This will eventually play a role in gene expression as the DNA is structured differently (loose or compact). Other epigenetics changes are through RNA, microRNA, sRNA and

DNA methylation reduction was performed to analyze the phenotypic inheritance that occurs in rice progeny that differ from the parent lines (Akimoto et al. 2007). Besides that, some researchers focused on epigenetic mechanism in rice nuclear genome that altered the rice flowering and sexual production (Sun et al. 2012; Hui et al. 2014). These epigenetics studies provided knowledge on different epigenetics mechanism that exist in enhancement of flowering and reproduction stage in rice plants. Also, the epigenetics that occurred in rice hybrid rice are often investigated (Peng et al. 2013; Hu et al. 2015). The epigenetic characterization of hybrid rice is essential to ensure the hybrid rice remains stable after unconventional breeding