In Vitro Screening of Crop Plants for Abiotic Stress Tolerance

Abstract

Due to the increasing world population, more attention has been attracted for increasing agricultural production. At the same time, environmental stresses are an important obstacle for increased agricultural production around the world. For this reason, plant breeders seek to breed important crop plants against major stresses such as drought, salinity and cold. Genetic diversity is the important key to success for plant breeders. This diversity occurs naturally or be induced by plant breeders within a plant species. Because of the low rate of natural mutations, plant breeders are attempting to create mutation by chemical and physical mutagens. However, chemical and physical mutagens that induced mutations are strongly dangerous for operator and some of them need advanced equipment. There is another way to create variations in the genome safely named somaclonal variations. Somaclonal variations are originated from culture and subculture of cells from a previous culture to fresh growth medium. One of the biggest advantages of this method (creation of somaclonal variations) is that plant breeder can guide somaclonal variations to create a desirable trait using selective agents. In this chapter, we tried to introduce the application of this method to breeding crops against abiotic stresses.