Genetic approaches to improve salinity tolerance in plants

Abstract

Abiotic stress tolerance in plants is gaining importance day by day. Different techniques are being employed to develop salt tolerant plants that directly or indirectly combat global food problems. Advanced comprehension of stress signal perception and transduction of associated molecular networks is now possible with the development in functional genomics and high throughput sequencing. In plant stress tolerance various genes, proteins, transcription factors, DNA histone-modifying enzymes, and several metabolites are playing very important role in stress tolerance. Determination of genomes of Arabidopsis, Oryza sativa spp. japonica cv. Nipponbare and integration of omics approach has augmented our knowledge pertaining to salt tolerance mechanisms of plants in natural environments. Application of transcriptomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics, and high-through-put DNA sequencing has enabled active analyses of regulatory networks that control abiotic stress responses. To unravel and exploit the function of genes is a major challenge of the post genomic era. This chapter therefore reviews the effect of salt stress on plants and the mechanism of salinity tolerance along with contributory roles of QTL, microRNA, microarray and proteomics.