RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Loss of rice PARAQUAT TOLERANCE 3 confers enhanced resistance to abiotic stresses and increases grain yield in field JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2020.02.22.961151 DO 10.1101/2020.02.22.961151 A1 Alamin Alfatih A1 Jiu Wu A1 Sami Ullah Jan A1 Zi-Sheng Zhang A1 Jing-Qiu Xia A1 Cheng-Bin Xiang YR 2020 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/23/2020.02.22.961151.abstract AB Plants frequently suffer from environmental stresses in nature and have evolved sophisticated and efficient mechanisms to cope with the stresses. To balance between growth and stress response, plants are equipped with efficient means to switch off the activated stress responses when stresses diminish. We previously revealed such an off-switch mechanism conferred by Arabidopsis PQT3, knockout of which significantly enhances resistance to abiotic stresses. To explore whether the rice homolog OsPQT3 is functionally conserved, we generated three knockout mutants with CRISPR-Cas9 technology. The OsPQT3 knockout mutants (ospqt3) display enhanced resistance to oxidative and salt stress with elevated expression of OsGPX1, OsAPX1, and OsSOD1. More importantly, the ospqt3 mutants show significantly enhanced agronomic performance with higher yield compared with the wild type under salt stress in greenhouse as well as in field conditions. We further showed that OsPQT3 was rapidly down regulated in response to oxidative and other abiotic stresses as AtPQT3. Taken together, these results support our previous findings that AtPQT3 acts as an off-switch in stress response, which is well conserved in rice. Therefore, PQT3 locus provides a promising candidate for crop improvement with enhanced stress resistance by gene editing technology.