Metallopeptidase 24 （M24） is a type of protein， which shares a common structural-fold， the ‘pita bread’ conserved domain widely exists in animals， plants and microorganisms and plays an important role in individual development and organ sculpting as well as the environmental stress response.In this study， in order to systematically study the characteristics of OsM24 family members in rice， the bioinformatics analysis and the qRT-PCR methods were carried out. The results showed that 16 OsM24 members were identified from rice genome and found to be unevenly distributed on 9 of 12 rice chromosomes.There were significant differences among OsM24 family members in terms of basic physicochemical properties such as the number of amino acids， protein stability and hydrophobicity etc.Their phylogenetic relationship suggested that OsM24 family members could be classified into 3 subfamilies OsM24I， OsM24II and OsM24III and members within the same subfamily exhibited conserved gene structure and motif compositions.GO ontology （GO） and predicted protein-protein interaction networks （PPI） analysis suggested that OsM24 family members exerted their functions in protein synthesis， processing， and modification by relying on their hydrolase activity. Cis-acting elements analysis indicated that there were a number of diverse regulatory elements related to hormones， stress， light and plant growth and development in the promoter region of OsM24 family member genes. The expression patterns analysis showed the expression of OsM24 genes in rice was significantly tissue-specific.The qRT-PCR analysis suggested apart from OsM24-7， OsM24-12， OsM24-15 and OsM24-16， the remaining 12 OsM24 genes all are involved in salt and alkaline stress. However， their expression patterns differed under salt stress and alkali stress conditions.These suggests that the OsM24 proteins may respond to salt and alkali stress through different regulatory pathways.Collectively， this study provides an important theoretical reference for further research on the role of M24 in rice development and saline-alkali stress response.