Xingzhu Feng

Hainan Institute of Biotechnology, Haikou, 570206, Hainan, China
Author    Correspondence author
Computational Molecular Biology, 2025, Vol. 15, No. 6   
Received: 30 Sep., 2025    Accepted: 10 Oct., 2025    Published: 29 Nov., 2025

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Salt stress is one of the main abiotic stresses affecting the growth and yield of rice, and it can significantly disrupt the ionic homeostasis and metabolic activities within cells. A thorough understanding of the metabolic regulation mechanism of rice under salt stress is of great significance for enhancing the salt tolerance of crops and achieving precise breeding. This study reviews the typical physiological and metabolic responses of rice to salt stress, including osmotic regulation, ion balance mechanisms, antioxidant metabolism, and dynamic reprogramming of primary and secondary metabolism. Based on metabolic network modeling methods such as flux balance analysis (FBA), combined with transcriptome and metabolome data, a specific metabolic model under salt stress conditions was constructed. And network mapping and throughput estimation are carried out by using databases such as KEGG and MetaCyc, as well as tools like COBRA and CellDesigner. In the case analysis, this study focused on the simulation and functional verification of central carbon metabolism and amino acid metabolism (such as proline and GABA), revealing the modular reconstruction process of the metabolic network under stress, identifying key nodes and restricted pathways, and predicting possible metabolic engineering modification strategies. This study provides a systems biology perspective for analyzing the metabolic regulation of rice under adverse conditions, and at the same time offers theoretical basis and computational support for the molecular design of salt-tolerant varieties.

Rice; Salt stress; Metabolic network; Computational modeling; Flux balance analysis