Sivaji Mathivanan

By Sivaji Mathivanan

Abiotic stress is the primary cause of crop loss worldwide, reducing average yields for most major crop plants by more than 50%. Among abiotic stress, drought, salinity, high temperature, and cold are major adverse environmental factors that limit the crop production and productivity by inhibiting the genetic potential of the plant. So, it leads to complete change of morphological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular behavior of the plants and modifies regular metabolism of life, thereby adversely affecting plant productivity. Major effects of the drought, salinity, extreme temperatures, and cold stress are often interconnected and form similar cellular damage. To adopt plants with various abiotic stresses, plants can initiate a number of molecular, cellular, and physiological changes in its system. Sensors are molecules that perceive the initial stress signal from the outside of the plant system and initiate a signaling cascade to transmit the signal and activate nuclear transcription factors to induce the expression of specific sets of genes. Understanding this molecular and physiological basis of plant responses produced because of abiotic stress will help in molecular and modern breeding applications toward developing improved stress-tolerant crops. This review presents an overview and implications of physiological and molecular aspects of main abiotic stress, i.e., drought, heat, salt, and cold. Potential strategies to improve abiotic tolerance in crops are discussed.

Part of the book: Abiotic Stress in Plants

By Sivaji Mathivanan

Nanobiosensor is one type of biosensor made up with usage of nanomaterials i.e., nanoparticles and nanostructures. Because of the nanomaterials’ unique properties such as good conductivity, and physicochemical, electrochemical, optical, magnetic and mechanical properties, Nanobiosensors are highly reliable and more sensitive in biosensing approaches over conventional sensors which is having various limitation in detection. Quantum dots, nanotubes, nanowires, magnetic and other nanoparticles enhance sensitivity and lower limit of detection by amplifying signals and providing novel signal transduction mechanisms enable detection of a very low level of food contaminants, pesticides, foodborne pathogens, toxins and plant metabolites. Nanobiosensors are having a lot of scope in sustainable agriculture because of its detecting ability i.e., sensing changes occurred in molecular level. So it can be utilized to find out the variations or modification of plant metabolities, volatiles, gas exchange, hormonal and ion concentration etc. which are the indicators of various harsh environmental stresses (abiotic), biotic and physiological stress. Identification of the stress in the starting stage itself will help us to avoid intensive plant damage and prevent yield losses created by the stress. Nanosensors can be used in smart farming, in which all the environmental factors related to plant growth like temperature, water, pH, humidity, nutritional factor etc. are measured and precaution taken to control the factors which reduce the crop production with the help of IOT platform, thereby enhance the productivity. In this review, discussed about nanobiosensors for detection of food contaminants and various application and its potential in agriculture.

Part of the book: Novel Nanomaterials