Genomic methods for improving abiotic stress tolerance in crops

Abstract

The twentieth century has seen tremendous progress toward increased food production to feed the world's current population of 7.3 billion. However, natural climatic changes leading to extreme weather patterns and human-influenced changes, which include the growing population, are blamed for adversely affecting the environment and are putting enormous strain on food productions. In particular, the crop plants that feed the world and sustain human health are being exposed to diverse environmental stresses, resulting in reduced farm yields. The rising threat of low food security demands urgent action from the scientific community to counteract the abiotic and biotic stresses encountered by crop plants. In this chapter, we focus our attention on examining the approaches, especially the genetic/genomic methods, which are being utilized by the researchers to improve the crop standing in the field under abiotic stresses.