Stress Breeding

Global warming and rapid increase in population growth are responsible for abiotic and biotic stresses, affecting crop growth and yield. Abiotic stress is the major yield-limiting factor for crop plants including temperature extremes, drought, salt, and heavy metals. They largely influence crop productivity and sustainability worldwide. Abiotic stress results in the disruption of ion distribution and homeostasis in the cell. It has become a major threat to food security due to the constant changes in climate and deterioration of the environment caused by human activity. Abiotic stresses affect the growth and yield formation of crop plants causing up to 70% yield losses in major food crops. Biotic stress in plants is caused by living organisms, depriving their host of their nutrients. These living organisms can cause various types of diseases, infections, and damage to crop plants. To overcome this problem, plants can initiate a number of molecular, cellular, and physiological changes to respond and adapt to such stresses. To meet the demands of a growing world population the current level of food production must increase by at least 70%. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop sustainable agriculture to address the challenges of food security and human health.

Compared to traditional breeding methods which are time-consuming and laborious, transgenic breeding techniques not only demonstrate remarkable developments in manipulations of the genes for the induction of desired characteristics into transgenic plants but also overcome the reproductive barrier among different plant species. Genome editing has become a very useful tool toward the improvement for the benefit of humanity by enhancing stress tolerance and improving crop production.  Transgenic breeding has proven to be a promising tool as this technique identifies the candidate genes, miRNAs, and transcription factors involved in specific plant processes thus, efficiently improving crop production through genetic modification. CRISPR/Cas9 is currently the prevalent genome-editing tool in plants and has significantly sped up crop breeding as this technique has revolutionized agriculture in a second green revolution. By using genome editing technologies, we could ensure nutritional security to meet the demand for food. Sequence tag profiling, microarray, targeting induced local lesions IN genomes, and next-generation sequencing is some of the genomics approaches which have been applied in crop breeding further, which has led to the development of modern cultivars. Further research is necessary for the underlying mechanisms of biological stress tolerance. The applications of current gene cloning approaches are-

• Faster trials
• Improved reference material
• Reduced complexity
• Bulk sequencing and mapping
• Targeted mapping
• Resistance gene enrichment
• Wider diversity

SNI Publications invites you to share your knowledge and recent advancement on Stress Breeding by publishing your work with the Journal of Biomedical and Biological Sciences also a small piece of information that can be shared here itself in the comment section.