Plant Abiotic Stress Physiology

Volume 2: Molecular Advancements

Tariq Aftab, Khalid Rehman Hakeem

• Publisher: Apple Academic Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781774639511
• eBook ISBN: 9781000401004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Botany
• Index: Biological Sciences

This two-volume set highlights the various innovative and emerging techniques and molecular applications that are currently being used in plant abiotic stress physiology. Volume 1: Responses and Adaptations focuses on the responses and adaptations of plants to stress factors at the cellular and molecular levels and offers a variety of advanced management strategies and technologies. Volume 2: Molecular Advancements introduces a range of state-of-the-art molecular advances for the mitigation of abiotic stress in plants.

With contributions from specialists in the field, Volume 1 first discusses the physiology and defense mechanisms of plants and the various kinds of stress, such as from challenging environments, climate change, and nutritional deficiencies. It goes on to discuss trailblazing management techniques that include genetics approaches for improving abiotic stress tolerance in crop plants along with CRISPR/CAS-mediated genome editing technologies.

Volume 2 discusses how plants have developed diverse physiological and molecular adjustments to safeguard themselves under challenging conditions and how emerging new technologies can utilize these plant adaptations to enhance plant resistance. These include using plant-environment interactions to develop crop species that are resilient to climate change, applying genomics and phenomics approaches from the study of abiotic stress tolerance and more.

Agriculture today faces countless challenges to meet the rising need for sustainable food supplies and guarantees of high-quality nourishment for a quickly increasing population. To ensure sufficient food production, it is necessary to address the difficult environmental circumstances that are causing cellular oxidative stress in plants due to abiotic factors, which play a defining role in shaping yield of crop plants. These two volumes help to meet these challenges by providing a rich source of information on plant abiotic stress physiology and effective management techniques.

Preface 1

Plants are often concurrently exposed to numerous abiotic stresses causing considerable yield loss. Plants have developed diverse physiological and molecular adjustments to safeguard themselves under challenging conditions. Developing substantiations indicate that plant reactions to a group of stresses are distinctive from single stress responses. Various stresses can intermingle in multifaceted ways to trigger wide-ranging molecular and metabolic responses, such as stress defencse, and/or injuries, for example, impairment of photosynthesis and membrane destruction. Many of the molecular adjustments include synchronized fluctuations in gene expression in response to environmental changes.

Plants, like other entities, must recognize environmental fluctuations through precise receptors; these receptors then activate an array of actions controlling cellular or molecular activity, comprising regulation of the gene expression for specific functions. Signaling molecules and secondary messengers play an important role in the molecular responses of plants to various abiotic stresses. Therefore, we need to understand current advancements of molecular mechanisms of cross-talk in relation to plant abiotic stress in order to create climate resilient crops that can survive under stress combinations.

This volume, Plant Abiotic Stress Physiology, Volume 2: Molecular Advancements, comprises 11 chapters contributed by specialists in the field, emphasizing a broad variety of themes of abiotic stress factors in plants at cellular and molecular levels.

Volume 2 of the 2-part Plant Abiotic Stress Physiology focuses on the responses and adaptations of plants to stress factors at the cellular and molecular levels and offers a variety of advanced management strategies and technologies.

—Tariq Aftab

Aligarh Muslim University, India

—Khalid Rehman Hakeem

King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia

Preface 2

Plants have adjusted to an astonishing variety of environment, and various investigations on molecular and ecological plant physiology have elucidated systematic understanding of the existence, dispersal, efficiency, and copiousness of plant species across the varied environments of the earth. Various plant physiological methods have significantly advanced our knowledge of respiration, photosynthesis, plant-water relations, and plant reactions to abiotic and biotic stress factors, from rapid to evolutionary points of view. These findings also specify the foundation for ascending plant physiological progressions from the cell to ecosystem. Developing the knowledge of physiological mechanisms and methods to augment plant responses to changing environmental circumstances is critical to developing eloquent high-throughput phenotyping tools and sustaining people’s resources as worldwide climate change intensifies. Among a number of areas being tracked to upsurge crop yield and food fabrication, enhancing photosynthetic proficiency is a perfect aim, offering great potential.

Plants counter to drivers of climate change by numerous molecular and physiological modifications that regularly adjust a plant’s ability to take up and remobilize nutrients and, subsequently, the elemental configuration and stoichiometry of plants. Plants therefore, occupy a central position underlying the associations between climate and global change and the status of nutrients in bionetworks. Moreover, we immediately need to assess our understanding of the role that plant reactions to climate change plays in altering and/or shielding the accessibility and stoichiometry of nutrients in environments.

The book comprises 22 chapters contributed by specialists in the field, emphasizing a broad variety of themes, conferring the management approaches of abiotic stress factors in plants at cellular and molecular level. We are confident that this book will provide the essential knowledge to the scientists who are working or have interest in this specific field. Unquestion-ably, this volume will be beneficial for common use of research students, teachers, and persons who have interest in plant abiotic stress physiology.

We are extremely thankful to all our contributors for accepting our invitation, for not only undertaking their research, but for venerably incorporating their knowledge in dispersed information from various fields in constituting the chapters and enduring editorial recommendations to finally create this venture.

We also thank the Apple Academic Press (CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group) team for their substantial assistance at every stage of the book creation.

Lastly, thanks are also due to friends, research students, and authors’ family members for their honest support and motivation in compilation of this book.

—Tariq Aftab

Aligarh Muslim University, India

—Khalid Rehman Hakeem

King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia

CHAPTER 1 Plant–Environment Interaction in Developing Crop Species Resilient to Climate Change

SUBHASH CHAND¹, B. INDU¹, JYOTI CHAUHAN², BASANT KUMAR², VIVEK KUMAR², PRJJAL DEY⁴, UDIT NANDAN MISHRA³, CHANDRASEKHAR SAHU³, and RAJESH KUMAR SINGHAL¹*

¹ICAR-Indian Grassland and Fodder Research Institute, Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, 284003, India

²Institute of Agriculture Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Uttar Pradesh, 221005, India

³M.S. Swaminathan School of Agriculture, Centurion University of Technology and Management, Paralakhemundi, Gajpati, Odisha 761211, India

⁴Faculty of Agriculture, Sri Sri University, Cuttack 754006, Odisha, India

*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected].

ABSTRACT

Plants are sessile in nature and phenotypic developmental plasticity has an important role in plant–environment interactions under fluctuating climatic situations. Plants are very sensitive to these circumstances and endeavor to acclimatize or adapt via modulating their phenotypic and genotypic characteristics. In this aspect, the development of climate-resilient crops is essential to accelerate production and meet global food security. These goals can be achieved by the application of high-throughput phenotyping, molecular breeding, and new advance biotechnological approaches, which will hasten the breeding cycle of a crop plant. Recent researches suggested that high-throughput phenotyping, micro-RNA-mediated developmental plasticity, phytohormones signaling, circadian clock, the molecular basis of eco-evolutionary phenological diversified functional traits, prediction of genotypic × environment interactions through next-generation sequencing and molecular markers, growth and development modeling, bioinformatics and omics approaches accelerates can be useful for deep understanding of plant–environment interaction. Therefore, considering before mentioned this chapter elaborates on crucial mechanisms (plant physiological, biochemical, genetical, molecular, and evolutionary) for further understanding of plant– environment interactions and developing climate resilient and smart crop varieties under extreme climatic events.

1.1 INTRODUCTION

Exponentially growing world population is a major concern for global food security and variability in the climatic factors further raise this concern. Among the climatic factors water quality and availability, air quality, fluctuate temperature, and soil quality have major impact on the production and productivity of major food crops [1]. Climate change has far-reaching consequences for global food production, and still had a considerable consequences on the global agricultural development through effects on soil fertility and carbon sequestration, microbial growth, and biodiversity, as well as on plant development and productivity [2]. The frequency and severity of extreme temperature consequences are consistently rising followed by climate change [3]. The CO₂ concentration in the environment has grown from 280 to 400 ppm due to ongoing deforestation activity and excess use of natural energy resources. Increasing “CO₂ fertilization effect” raises crop productivity and crop yield, thereby increasing the likelihood of increased food production [4]. Such global weather problems significantly affect the phenology, molecular, biochemical, and physiological processes [5]. Moreover, alterations in these processes are responsible for yield penalty in major food crops. Therefore, to reduce the impacts of these situations, development of climate-resilient crops/varieties is promising approach for achieving food security in near future [6].

To achieve these goals, researchers are continuously working on finding the new strategies and have succeeded some millstones so far. Moreover, plant physiological, agronomical, breeding, soil, and biotechnological approaches are integrated into one frame and modern technology swiftly boost the process of development of climate-resilient crops [7]. To consider the above-mentioned situations, this chapter explores the mechanisms of understanding genotype × environment interaction (G × E). We focused on the basics of G × E interaction, modern approaches such as phenotyping, omics (genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics), molecular breeding (identification of quantitative trait loci), next-generation sequencing, and bioinformatics for the development of climate-resilient crops and highlighted in Figure 1.1. Conclusively, this chapter is a collective form of recent advance information’s on strategies for development of climate-resilient crops, which give novel insight into the understanding of plant × environment interaction.

FIGURE 1.1 The impacts of climate change and development of climate-resilient ideotype in plants.

1.2 G × E INTERACTION UNDER CLIMATE CHANGE

Today climate change is the biggest problem in front of every ecological entity, particularly for agroecology. Moreover, climatic variables, geographical shift, seasonal changes, and alteration in genotypic adaptations are happening across the world. We all know that plants are sessile in nature and need to cope all the consequences such as drought, flood, heat, and cold without moving. A range from grain to legume to oil seed and to asexually propagated crops suffers the yield losses, especially unfavorable climatic conditions during their reproductive stage. It has been studied that critical temperature lower than 32 °C affects the anthesis and pollination, which leads to poor fertilization [8] and terminal drought can cause shorten and shrunken grains [9]. Adaptation of any crop/variety according to changing environment over the years is somewhat not desirable as there is fear of loss of natural genetic worth and risk of abiotic and biotic stress.

By keeping in mind the foreseeing situation, we need to focus on the development of more adaptable genotypes that are suitable to fluctuating environment. Therefore, it is essential to develop crop/varieties that can rule over the years with consistency. For this, assessment of a genotypes is a crucial step in plant breeding and it also depends on several other factors. Varietal adaptation to climate is important for the stabilization of crop production both over regions and years. Environment has several component factors (topography, soil type, temperature, day length, relative humidity, etc.) and each of these factors exerts its influence on the performance of a genotype [10]. Adaptation of a genotype in any agroecological is dependent on its interaction with microenvironment factors, thus G × E interactions play a crucial role in determining the performance, adaptability, and stability of a genotype in a particular season or location. The study of G × E interaction also helps in determining the real genetic worth of a genotype because its expressivity depends on the respective environment. To determine the magnitude of G × E interaction, we use the different s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Preface 1
• Preface 2
• 1. Plant–Environment Interaction in Developing Crop Species Resilient to Climate Change
• 2. Genomics Approaches to Study Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Plants
• 3. Role of Phenomics in Screening Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Plants
• 4. Genetic Regulation, Biosynthesis, and the Roles of Osmoprotective Compounds in Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Plants
• 5. Plant Growth Regulators and Their Interaction with Abiotic Stress Factors
• 6. Role of Abscisic Acid in Abiotic Stress Condition and Its Management
• 7. Management of Abiotic Stress Conditions by Salicylic Acid
• 8. Ethylene Signaling during Leaf Senescence
• 9. Role of Methyl Jasmonate in Mitigating Plant Stress and Its Interaction with Salicylic Acid
• 10. Harnessing CRISPR/Cas System for Resistance against Abiotic Stresses in Rice: Recent Advances, Applications, Challenges, and Prospects
• 11. Emerging Roles of Osmoprotectants in the Abiotic Stress Tolerance of Plants
• Index