Southern rice black-streaked dwarf virus (SRBSDV) causes severe epidemical disease on rice with the infected area up to millions of hectares in South China and North and Central of Vietnam. So far, there are no effective, cheap, quick, and practicable methods for diagnosing SRBSDV. The conventional RT-PCR technique is the most popular method for detecting SRBSDV with high accuracy. However, it is hard to apply this method for large-scale SDBSDV diagnosis because of the requirements of expensive reagents and instruments, as well as complex procedures. Meanwhile, SRBSDV diagnostic techniques based on antigen detection have outstanding advantages due to their low cost, easy manipulation, and wide application possibility. Today, there are still no commercially available specific antibodies to SRBSDV. In a previous study, to develop the SRBSDV diagnostic technique by the ELISA technique, a SRBSDV specific antibody was generated by a recombinant P10 envelope protein (66kDa), which has a titer of 1:5,000. In this study, we continued to study the production of SRBSDV specific polyclonal antibodies from small antigen–rich peptides from the SRBSDV P10 envelope protein. The resulting purified antibody can specifically bind to the P10 protein and at the diluted concentration of 1:100,000 it can detect SRBSDV in infected rice samples via the dot-blot technique. Our research results open up new opportunities for proactive antibodies to develop a SRBSDV membrane rapid diagnostic kit.

Most of the rice cultivars exhibit suspension of growth when submerged to overcome the reduced availability of oxygen. When the situation continues, majority of the cultivars unable to recover after the flood recedes. However, there are fortunately some rice genotypes that can withstand such submerged condition for up to two weeks by adapting two totally opposite mechanisms. One type of cultivars elongates enormously at a very short span of time and the leaves come above the water level. In the second type, they remain under water without any growth. Cultivars of both types tolerate the submergence but the first category easily lodges when flood water recede. In those lines, yields are reduced drastically. In this study, we focus on characterize the genetic variation at the Sub1 locus and to associate its relevance, if any, to submergence tolerance among the deep water landraces. As a first step, seeds of some rice cultivars collected from North-east Indian regions were initially selected for the characterization of genetic variation. The PCR based analysis involving several genes known to be associated with submergence tolerance did not reveal much difference. However, Southern hybridization revealed certain differences between submergence tolerant and susceptible cultivars. Although we did not notice major difference with regard to Sub1 genes when tried with EcoRI and BamHI, differences were noticed with adh1 and RAmy3C genes. Representative, Southern analysis showed the genetic variation among the deep-water cultivars as compared to Swarna and Sub1-Swarna. It is possible that deep-water rice cultivars may not differ in their genome at Sub1 locus but they respond through SNORKEL genes under submergence.

Chloroplasts have evolved from photosynthetic cyanobacteria-like progenitors through endosymbiosis. The chloroplasts of present-day land plants have their own transcription and translation systems that show several similarities with prokaryotic organisms. A remarkable feature of the chloroplast translation system is the use of non-AUG start codons in the protein synthesis of certain genes that are evolutionarily conserved from Algae to angiosperms. However, the biological significance of such use of non-AUG codons is not fully understood. The present study was undertaken to unravel the significance of non-AUG start codons in vivo using the chloroplast genetic engineering approach. For this purpose, stable transplastomic tobacco plants expressing a reporter gene i.e. uidA (GUS) under four different start codons (AUG/UUG/GUG/CUG) were generated and β-glucuronidase (GUS) expression was compared. To investigate further the role of promoter sequences proximal to the start codon, uidA was expressed under two different chloroplast gene promoters psbA and psbC that use AUG and a non-AUG (GUG) start codons, respectively, and also showed significant differences in the DNA sequence surrounding the start codon. Further, to delineate the role of RNA editing that creates AUG start codon by editing non-AUG codons, if any, which is another important feature of the chloroplast transcription and translation system, transcripts were sequenced. In addition, a proteomic approach was used to identify the translation initiation site(s) of GUS and the N-terminal amino acid encoded when expressed under different non-AUG start codons. The results showed that chloroplasts use non-AUG start codons in combination with the translation initiation site as an additional layer of gene regulation to over-express proteins that are required at high levels due to their high rates of turnover.