Insights into the mechanisms of susceptibility and tolerance against salinity stress in rice plant

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is an important food crop that is consumed by more than half of the world's population. Soil salinity is a serious problem that reduces rice yield because it is more sensitive to salt stress than other cereal crops. Salinity affects many aspects of the rice plant phases like it has a damaging effect on rice plant growth e.g. germination inhibition, difficulties in the crop establishment, development of the leaf area, decrease in the production of the dry matter, delay in the seed setting and even leading to the sterility. The susceptibility or resistance to high salinity in rice plants is an organized activity of multiple genes which also interact with other components of the different path­ways of stress signals transduction. The salt tolerance genes can be used to produce salinity tolerant rice varieties by using genetic engineering and marker-assisted selection. In this review, we have discussed the effects of salt stress on different growth stages and yield of the rice plant and updated on different stress-responsive genes and salinity tolerance mechanisms which will be helpful to improve the high-yielding rice varieties against the salinity stress. To develop salt-tolerant and high-yielding rice varieties, we have focused on the need to incorporate genomics, phenotyping, and metabolic profiling into breeding and transgenic approaches.