Abiotic stress management in fruit crop Litchi chinensis

Abstract

Frequent variations in global climate patterns direct changes in soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Abiotic stresses caused due to these changes are responsible for inducing various modifications at molecular and cellular level in plants that in turn cause irreversible damage to agricultural yields of several major fruit crops. Lychee is a delicious, juicy fruit packed with numerous health benefits. The lychee production on a commercial level in Southeast Asia is a source of livelihood for thousands of people. Being highly specific in its climatic prerequisite, lychee crop quality and yield is adversely affected by any alteration in the environmental factors causing serious economic loss for the growers. In the near future, this situation might become more critical due to scarcity of land and water resources and deterioration of growing conditions in many parts of the world. Thus, it is necessary to develop fruit crop varieties that are resilient to abiotic stresses to ensure nutritional and financial security to a large population of the world. With the development of new biotechnological tools such as genomics, transcriptomics, microarray, and next-generation sequencing, plant scientist can investigate molecular, physiological, and biochemical regulatory pathways activated in planta to cope with various abiotic stresses and use this information for genetic improvement of crop as well as the formation of new generation GMOs. In this chapter, we will focus on various abiotic stresses that interferes with lychee growth and development and affects its productivity as well as provide a detailed update on recent research which contributes to a better understanding of stress regulatory mechanism to combat abiotic stresses in lychee.