With the increase of frequency of low temperature disaster， cold tolerance in rice breeding became an important content of rice production. It is an effective way to improve rice cold tolerance by genetic engineering compared with the conventional breeding methods. The cold tolerance genes can be divided into three kinds accoding to the low temperature signal transduction pathway， which are protein kinase（CDPK， MAPK， etc）genes， transcripton factors（ICE1/ICE\|like， CBF/DREB， MYB，etc）， and functional genes that involved in biosynthesis of osmotic substances， encoding fatty acid desaturation enzyme and so on. This paper systematically and comprehensively elaborated the application of cold tolerance genes in rice cold tolerance genetic engineering， and put forward some problems in this field.

 

rice, cold tolerance gene, genetic engineering