Molecular approaches and salt tolerance mechanisms in leguminous plants

Abstract

Legumes are one of the most important food crops not only serving an excellent source for human nutrition around the world but also improving soil quality through biological nitrogen fixation. Its production and yield is mainly hampered by abiotic stresses. Among them salt stress is threatening legume production worldwide. Hence, considering the importance of legumes, it is essential to understand and develop the strategies to improve their performance under salt stress. To develop the salt stress-tolerant legume varieties requires knowledge of morphological, physiological as well as key biochemical processes along with molecular controls of salt traits at different plant development stages. Molecular approaches such as transgenics, molecular marker-assisted selection, gene expression microarray, genomics, transgenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics have identified several key factors, proteins, and genes in different cellular pathways underlying salt stress tolerance in leguminous crops. Both genetic engineering and molecular marker-assisted selection are efficient approaches to the development of salt-tolerant legumes. Omics approaches led to the identification of various metabolites as well as functional and regulatory genes in response to salt stress which not only provide new avenues to understand key molecular mechanisms underlying salt stress tolerance but also eventually beneficial to produce stress-tolerant legumes with improved characteristics. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview on salt tolerance mechanism and also briefly discuss about molecular approaches in improvement of leguminous crops.