ABSTRACT
Sustainable agriculture needs crop improvement for addressing critical problems including stress by employing available biotechniques. The basic aim underlying all available biotechniques is to make crop plants resistant/tolerant towards the abiotic stress and help plants overcome the pressure induced by the stress. Conventional breeding programmes have been employed where inter-specific or inter-generic hybridization was opted to gather favourable genes including stress tolerance as well. Biotechnology is offered multiple strategies to develop transgenic crop plants with improved tolerance to abiotic stress. The genes encoding protein factors regulate gene expression and signal transduction and thus prove to be helpful in inducing stress responsive genes during stressed conditions. This biotechnique, in vitro culture of plant cells, tissues or organs is grown on a medium supplemented with specific selective agent followed by selection of regenerated plants with desirable characters. Somaclonal variation does exist in tissue culture which can be exploited for in vitro selection of cells and tissues against several stresses.
