Rice is the major staple food for more than half of world's population. As global climate changes, many places have seen changes in rainfall, resulting in more floods, droughts and severe heat waves. Cereal crops must be grown in hotter, drier and more hostile climates as expansion of the range of food crops accelerates, and climate change makes existing cropping zones more unreliable. Two rice varieties with contrasting genetic backgrounds, Nipponbare and IAC 1131, were used in this study. Nipponbare, the first fully sequenced agricultural plant, is a temperate-climate rice from Japan while IAC 1131, which is endemic to the hotter climate of upland rice fields in Java, is a drought tolerant upland tropical rice from the same sub-species as Nipponbare. We have grown both varieties and subjected them to drought stress and subsequent recovery, and collected material at each timepoint. Vegetative growth is cirtical for high productivity crops. We have focused on cell division – the variable for growth of any organism. The very small cohorts of dividing cells in the plant meristem have been collected via micro dissection and analyzed separately. We contrast this with protein expression patterns in the mature leaf blades, using both label free quantitative shotgun proteomic analysis and Tandem Mass Tags labelling. Preliminary results indicate 275 drought response proteins in Nipponbare while in IAC 1131 205 drought response proteins are identified. Cell biology analysis reveals that cell division in IAC 1131 is hardly affected by drought stress, however, the number of dividing cells in Nipponbare decreases significantly.  The wealth of detailed information produced in this study will provides insight into the key proteins involved in leaf growth and drought tolerance.