Differential Gene Expression in Indica rice cultivars during drought stress

To obtain a better perception of the molecular machinery functioning at reproductive stage which is more prone to drought stress we performed transcriptome analysis in tolerant and sensitive rice genotypes Towards this end we performed comparative transcriptome analysis of N22 and IR64 rice cultivars by transcriptome sequencing under control and drought stress conditions at the reproductive stage in both leaf and root tissues Total RNA was isolated from the leaf and root tissues of each cultivar by using TRI Reagent Two biological replicates from each cultivar were used for transcriptome sequencing The cDNA libraries were prepared individually for each sample following a series of procedures using mRNASeq Sample Prep Kit from Illumina following the manufacturers instructions for paired-end sequencing A total of eight transcriptome libraries were prepared from leaf and root tissues from the two rice cultivars grown under control and drought stress, and sequenced using Illumina platform