Salinity And Drought Tolerance In Plants

This book presents various aspects of salt and drought stress signaling in crops, combining physiological, biochemical, and molecular studies. Salt and drought stress are two major constraints on crop production worldwide. Plants possess several mechanisms to cope with the adverse effects of salt and drought. Among these mechanisms, stress signaling is very important, because it integrates and regulates nuclear gene expression and other cellular activities, which can help to restore cellular homeostasis. Accordingly, understanding the signaling cascades will help plant biologists to grasp the tolerance mechanisms that allow breeders to develop tolerant crop varieties. This book is an essential resource for researchers and graduate students working on salt and drought stress physiology and plant breeding.

This edited book is a comprehensive collection of scientific research on different plants under drought and salt stress conditions. The main focus of this book is to elaborate on the mechanisms being operative in plants under stress and how various biological factors mitigate the adverse effects for better plant productivity. This book covers all physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms operating under drought and saline stresses. The current status and impact of drought and salinity on various crop plants have been elaborated on in different chapters. Agricultural lands are either turning barren or becoming more saline and drought-prone with increasing temperatures, decreasing water tables, untimely rainfall, and other environmental factors. In India, salt-affected soils occupy an area of about 6.73 million ha of which saline and sodic soils constitute roughly 40 and 60%, respectively. All these factors individually or cumulatively, affect the plant growth and development and hence, the crop productivity with the monetary loss. The inbuilt plant's ability with modified/acclimatized mechanisms has been described in various chapters with step-wise descriptions. The role of various plant growth-promoting agents including nano-particles, micro-organisms, metabolites or phytohormones, etc in mitigating adverse effects of drought and salinity has been explained precisely. Updated information on the use of speed breeding, proteomics, epigenetics, and transcriptomics in different crops along with high throughput technologies is included for the cross-talk of various network mechanisms. This book is helpful for the readers in knowing salinity and drought through the physiological, biochemical and genetic, and molecular levels to understand plant behaviour under stress conditions. Also, the book serves as additional reading material for undergraduate and graduate students of agriculture, plant physiology, biochemistry, forestry, and environmental sciences. National and international agricultural scientists and policymakers will also find this to be a useful read.

With near-comprehensive coverage of new advances in crop breeding for drought and salinity stress tolerance, this timely work seeks to integrate the most recent findings about key biological determinants of plant stress tolerance with modern crop improvement strategies. This volume is unique because is provides exceptionally wide coverage of current knowledge and expertise being applied in drought and salt tolerance research.

This book presents various aspects of salt and drought stress signaling in crops, combining physiological, biochemical, and molecular studies. Salt and drought stress are two major constraints on crop production worldwide. Plants possess several mechanisms to cope with the adverse effects of salt and drought. Among these mechanisms, stress signaling is very important, because it integrates and regulates nuclear gene expression and other cellular activities, which can help to restore cellular homeostasis. Accordingly, understanding the signaling cascades will help plant biologists to grasp the tolerance mechanisms that allow breeders to develop tolerant crop varieties. This book is an essential resource for researchers and graduate students working on salt and drought stress physiology and plant breeding.

Abiotic stress adversely affects crop production worldwide, decreasing average yields for most of the crops to 50%. Among various abiotic stresses affecting agricultural production, drought stress is considered to be the main source of yield reduction around the globe. Due to an increasing world population, drought stress will lead to a serious food shortage by 2050. The situation may become worse due to predicated global climate change that may multiply the frequency and duration and severity of such abiotic stresses. Hence, there is an urgent need to improve our understanding on complex mechanisms of drought stress tolerance and to develop modern varieties that are more resilient to drought stress. Identification of the potential novel genes responsible for drought tolerance in crop plants will contribute to understanding the molecular mechanism of crop responses to drought stress. The discovery of novel genes, the analysis of their expression patterns in response to drought stress, and the determination of their potential functions in drought stress adaptation will provide the basis of effective engineering strategies to enhance crop drought stress tolerance. Although the in-depth water stress tolerance mechanisms is still unclear, it can be to some extent explained on the basis of ion homeostasis mediated by stress adaptation effectors, toxic radical scavenging, osmolyte biosynthesis, water transport, and long distance signaling response coordination. Importantly, complete elucidation of the physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms for drought stress, perception, transduction, and tolerance is still a challenge to the plant biologists. The findings presented in volume 1 call attention to the physiological and biochemical modalities of drought stress that influence crop productivity, whereas volume 2 summarizes our current understanding on the molecular and genetic mechanisms of drought stress resistance in plants.

World population is growing at an alarming rate and is anticipated to reach about six billion by the end of year 2050. On the other hand, agricultural productivity is not increasing at a required rate to keep up with the food demand. The reasons for this are water shortages, depleting soil fertility and mainly various abiotic stresses. The fast pace at which developments and novel findings that are recently taking place in the cutting edge areas of molecular biology and basic genetics, have reinforced and augmented the efficiency of science outputs in dealing with plant abiotic stresses. In depth understanding of the stresses and their effects on plants is of paramount importance to evolve effective strategies to counter them. This book is broadly dived into sections on the stresses, their mechanisms and tolerance, genetics and adaptation, and focuses on the mechanic aspects in addition to touching some adaptation features. The chief objective of the book hence is to deliver state of the art information for comprehending the nature of abiotic stress in plants. We attempted here to present a judicious mixture of outlooks in order to interest workers in all areas of plant sciences.

Environmental conditions and changes, irrespective of source, cause a variety of stresses, one of the most prevalent of which is salt stress. Excess amount of salt in the soil adversely affects plant growth and development, and impairs production. Nearly 20% of the world’s cultivated area and nearly half of the world’s irrigated lands are affected by salinity. Processes such as seed germination, seedling growth and vigour, vegetative growth, flowering and fruit set are adversely affected by high salt concentration, ultimately causing diminished economic yield and also quality of produce. Most plants cannot tolerate salt-stress. High salt concentrations decrease the osmotic potential of soil solution, creating a water stress in plants and severe ion toxicity. The interactions of salts with mineral nutrition may result in nutrient imbalances and deficiencies. The consequence of all these can ultimately lead to plant death as a result of growth arrest and molecular damage. To achieve salt-tolerance, the foremost task is either to prevent or alleviate the damage, or to re-establish homeostatic conditions in the new stressful environment. Barring a few exceptions, the conventional breeding techniques have been unsuccessful in transferring the salt-tolerance trait to the target species. A host of genes encoding different structural and regulatory proteins have been used over the past 5–6 years for the development of a range of abiotic stress-tolerant plants. It has been shown that using regulatory genes is a more effective approach for developing stress-tolerant plants. Thus, understanding the molecular basis will be helpful in developing selection strategies for improving salinity tolerance. This book will shed light on the effect of salt stress on plants development, proteomics, genomics, genetic engineering, and plant adaptations, among other topics. The book will cover around 25 chapters with contributors from all over the world. ​​