ABSTRACT
Abstract. Salinity stress poses a great threat to agricultural productivity worldwide as it can severely affect crop yields. Understanding the physiological and molecular aspects of the tolerance mechanism at whole-plant, tissue, cellular, and molecular levels along with the complex network of genes, proteins, and metabolites involved in this process is of paramount importance. This chapter reviews the transcripts identified by microarray studies in the recent past that are involved in various cellular and molecular processes such as response to stimulus, transcription and translation factor activity, SNAP receptor, and chaperone binding activity along with the possibilities of identifying novel
genes from noncrop sources using these technologies. A major issue of crop, growth stage, tissue, and stress-specific profiling of transcripts and integrating this huge amount of microarray data thus generated is also discussed. Light is shed on the current trends in identifying candidate genes and the potential of bioinformatic integration of the data generated by microarrays with the pregenomic and various other high-throughput postgenomic technologies.
