Comparative transcriptome analysis of two rice genotypes differing in their tolerance to saline-alkaline stress

Saline-alkaline stress is a combined stress of salt and alkali. Under saline-alkaline stress, gene expression changes involved in the individual saline and alkaline stresses are detected. Therefore, the saline-alkaline treatment may induce general stress responses in plant. In our study, several biological processes and metabolic pathways are found to function in tolerance to saline-alkaline stress, such as response to stress, response to jasmonic acid, organic acid metabolic process, nicotianamine biosynthetic process, iron homeostasis, betalain biosynthesis, secondary metabolites and diterpenoid and phenylpropanoid biosynthesis. Although the DEGs in these biological processes and metabolic pathways may be not specific to the saline-alkaline condition, they merit further investigation to elucidate their roles in responses to aline-alkaline stress. In the future study, DEGs involved in iron homeostasis and gibberellin (GA) and phenylpropanoid biosynthesis will be focused