In the post-genomic era, the development of ‘Omic’ based approaches such as transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, interactomic, and phenomic in several model organisms have laid the foundation of “Functional Genomics”. This area of science deals with the understanding of large network of genes/proteins and integration of transcript data to proteins, and protein to metabolite, and the complex and dynamic interaction to develop a response or phenotype.
Reversible protein phosphorylation mediated by kinases and protein phosphatases is one of the important cellular responses to maintain a critical balance in phospho-regulation during normal and adverse growth conditions. A genome-wide identification of protein phosphatase encoding genes in rice showed the presence of 132 genes (OsPPs). Protein structure, domain and sequence analysis divided entire protein phosphatase complement into PP2A (17), PP2C (90), PTP (2), DSP (23) and LMWP (1) classes.
At present, we have functionally characterized multiple dual-specificity protein phosphatases (DSP) containing carbohydrate binding domain (involved in starch metabolism) in rice under nutrient deficiency and stress mitigation. The knowledge generated from this study will be crucial for developing genome edited rice for tackling the problem of crop loss due to climate change and excessive anthropogenic activities.
