Genomic basis of rice geographic adaptation to soil nitrogen

Intensive application of inorganic nitrogen underlies marked increase in crop production yet imposes detrimental impact on ecosystems, hence it is crucial for future sustainable agriculture to improve nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE). Here we report the genetic basis of NUE associated with the local soil adaptation in rice. With a diverse rice germplasm panel collected from different ecogeographic regions, we performed genome-wide association study on tillering response to nitrogen (TRN), the most correlated trait with NUE of rice, and identified OsTCP19 as a modulator of TRN via transcriptionally responding to nitrogen and targeting to Dwarf and Low-Tillering (DLT), a tiller-promoting gene. A 29-bp InDel in OsTCP19 promoter confers differential transcription response to nitrogen and TRN variation among rice varieties. The high-TRN allele of OsTCP19 (OsTCP19-H) is prevalent in wild rice population, but largely lost in modern cultivars correlating with increased local soil nitrogen content, suggesting that it might have contributed to geographic adaptation in rice. Introgression of OsTCP19-H into modern rice cultivars boosts grain yield and NUE under low or moderate nitrogen levels, demonstrating its enormous potential for rice breeding and environment amelioration through reducing nitrogen application. Overall design: mRNA profiles of rice seedling roots (14-day-old) in wild-type (ZH11) and OsTCP19 overexpression lines were generated by high throughput sequencing using BGISEQ-500 platform, each line was sequenced with three biologically independent repeats.