Exploring OsHAK Transporters for the Salt Responsiveness in Rice

Abstract

Environmental stresses are the major constraint in crop growth andproductivity, particularly in rice. Improving rice against major abiotic stressorssuch as salinity is one of the major thrust areas. In this direction, the traitof sodium exclusion was the primary focus among the rice breeders toenhance salt tolerance. Along similar lines, increased uptake of potassium,the counter ion of Na+, through high-affinity potassium transporters (HAK)assumes significance in the context of maintaining a favorable Na/K ratio, alow Na/K is an indicator of salt tolerance. The OsHAK family in rice includes27 members and an insight into the evolution, structure, and expressionthrough in silico approaches was attempted. Phylogenetic analysisexhibited four distinct groupings of the OsHAK family, and functional motifanalysis revealed a characteristic consensus sequence among the OsHAKtransporters. Relative gene expression analysis based on publishedmicroarray data put forth the differential regulation of OsHAK3 X2, OsHAK8,OsHAK14(X2), OsHAK15 and OsHAK26 between salt-tolerant landracePokkali and susceptible cultivar IR29 and their tissue-specific expressionprofiles predicted. This study narrowed down a set of putative OsHAKs fromthe larger family for their role in enhancing cellular potassium under saltstress thus paving the way for crop improvement

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.001093

Pages

1 - 9

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

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