Rice is a staple food for more than half of the world's population and is directly associated with food security. An additional 100 million tonnes of rice production is estimated to be needed to meet the demand of 9.1 billion people by 2050 (Jaggard, Qi, & Ober, 2010; Mahender, Swamy, Anandan, & Ali, 2019). However, the genetic gain for rice grain yield has stagnated over the past decade, resulting in productivity plateaus even in favourable environments. Also, rice growth and development faces different abiotic stresses such as drought, cold, heat, salinity, acidic soils, nutritional deficiencies, and soil toxicities, which cause significant losses in grain yield (Mahender et al., 2019). To deal with the environmental challenges, a better understanding of genetic responses to abiotic stress is needed, particularly those mechanisms that promote plant survival at the cellular and organism level. Autophagy (meaning self-eating) is one of these mechanisms, in which macromolecules and cellular components are recycled into vacuoles for reuse. This process is crucial for the maintenance of cellular homeostasis, acts on normal conditions, and is stimulated under adverse conditions (Avin-Wittenberg, 2019; Signorelli, Tarkowski, Van den Ende, & Bassham, 2019). In plants, autophagy has been described in Arabidopsis
