Summy Yadav

By Summy Yadav and Kamal Dutt Sharma

Drought is a major environmental stress factor that affects the growth and development of plants. Most of the physiological traits associated with drought tolerance are quantitative in nature. An important research strategy that has been widely used to deal with such complexity is to use molecular markers to identify quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in appropriate mapping populations. In response to drought brought about by soil water deficit, plants can exhibit either drought escape or drought resistance mechanisms, with resistance further classified into drought avoidance and drought tolerance. Drought escape is the ability of plants to complete the life cycle before severe stress arrives. Drought avoidance is the maintenance of high tissue water potential in spite of soil water deficit. Drought avoidance is consequence of improved water uptake under stress and the capacity of plant cells to hold acquired water that reduces water loss. Drought tolerance is the ability to withstand water deficit with low tissue water potential. Plant water status that includes leaf water potential, osmotic potential and relative water content (RWC) represents an easy measure of water deficit and provides best sensor for stress. Genomics‐assisted breeding (GAB) approaches, such as marker‐assisted selection (MAS), can greatly improve precision and efficiency of selection in crop breeding. Molecular markers can facilitate indirect selection for traits that are difficult or inconvenient to score directly, pyramiding genes from different sources and combining resistance to multiple stresses. Conventional breeding for developing drought‐tolerant crop varieties is time‐consuming and labor intensive due to the quantitative nature of drought tolerance and difficulties in selection for drought tolerance. The identification of genomic regions associated with drought tolerance would enable breeders to develop improved cultivars with increased drought tolerance using marker‐assisted selection (MAS). This requires integration of knowledge from plant physiology and biotechnology into plant breeding. The availability of a large number of molecular markers, dense genetic maps and markers associated with traits and transcriptomics resources have made it possible to integrate genomics technologies into chickpea improvement.

Part of the book: Plant Growth

By Summy Yadav, Payal Modi, Akanksha Dave, Akdasbanu Vijapura, Disha Patel and Mohini Patel

Crop yield is mainly influenced by climatic factors, agronomic factors, pests and nutrient availability in the soil. Stress is any adverse environmental condition that hampers proper growth of plant. Abiotic stress creates adverse effect on multiple procedures of morphology, biochemistry and physiology that are directly connected with growth and yield of plant. Abiotic stress are quantitative trait hence genes linked to these traits can be identified and used to select desirable alleles responsible for tolerance in plant. Plants can initiate a number of molecular, cellular and physiological modifications to react to and adapt to abiotic stress. Crop productivity is significantly affected by drought, salinity and cold. Abiotic stress reduce water availability to plant roots by increasing water soluble salts in soil and plants suffer from increased osmotic pressure outside the root. Physiological changes include lowering of leaf osmotic potential, water potential and relative water content, creation of nutritional imbalance, enhancing relative stress injury or one or more combination of these factors. Morphological and biochemical changes include changes in root and shoot length, number of leaves, secondary metabolite (glycine betaine, proline, MDA, abscisic acid) accumulation in plant, source and sink ratio. Proposed chapter will concentrate on enhancing plant response to abiotic stress and contemporary breeding application to increasing stress tolerance.

Part of the book: Sustainable Crop Production