During post-harvest processing (polishing/milling) of brown rice, bran layer consisting of aleurone layer, pericarp and embryo is removed to produce white rice. Bran is nutritionally superior as it has major reservoirs of various minerals, vitamins, essential mineral oils and other bioactive compounds, whereas white rice portion is nutritionally inferior as it mainly contains starchy endosperm. Irony is that nutritionally inferior white rice is a major staple food for almost half of the country, whereas almost 2/3rd of nutrient rich bran fraction is often get wasted as inedible due to instability of the bran. Thus both the products of the rice post-harvest process, the white rice and the bran, have their own inherent problems. We aim to overcome both these problems using biotechnological approaches. This will help to increase nutritional value of the white rice and increase the stability of bran. Towards this end, using high-resolution tissue-type specific transcriptomics approach we have prepared a gene expression atlas of developing rice grain and identified cell/tissue-type specific genes. From this very highly-resolved gene expression dataset, we have identified certain genes which might be potentially involved in micronutrient accumulation, particularly iron and vitamin A, in the grain, and we are analyzing their role in nutritional enhancement of the white rice. For increasing the stability of bran we are looking at role of various hydrolytic enzymes such as lipases, estrases, etc., which have very tissue-type specific expression in our transcriptomics dataset. We are using various molecular biology tools such as cell-type specific transcriptomics, in-situ hybridisation, confocal imaging, CRISPR-Cas9 system, expression in heterologous system and plant tissue culture approaches for our studies.

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