Biotechnology and crop improvement under changing environment: Current interventions

Abstract

In the era of frequently changing global climatic conditions (like temperature extremes, drought or flooding, soil and air quality or light levels) along with rapidly increasing global population, reducing agriculturally viable land area and soil microflora and soil quality degradation pose a serious threat on crop performance thus on global food security. The climatic variables significantly affect the species reproduction and performance in terms of crop produce. Plant biotechnology has progressed a lot starting from conventional breeding approaches to genetic engineering, genome editing and speed breeding, but so far little has been achieved to develop climate resilient/abiotic stress tolerant and high yielding crop varieties. The reasons may be the complex nature of stress factors, as well as the complexity of genetic regulatory networks. Therefore, the ‘plant gene regulatory network’ is crucial to understand the plant development and survival under various environmental insults.