ABSTRACT
Biotic and abiotic stresses are the major limiting factors for crop yield. These stresses mainly affect plant growth, development, and yield. In the direction of crop yield improvement, microorganisms play an important role.Microorganisms are the most natural inhabitants of diverse environments and these microbes exhibit enormous metabolic capabilities to mitigate adverse conditions. Since plant-microbe interactions are a fundamental part of the living ecosystem, they are supposed to be the natural partners that modulate local and systemic pathways in plants. These interactions include complex mechanisms within the plant cellular network. It also becomes necessary to generate deeper knowledge into the way of stress-reduction in crop plants for their translation in higher crop yield. Many “omics” approaches such as genomics, transcriptomics, and others integrate analyses and interpretationswith regards to plant-microbe interactions that can answer what is happening preciselywithin the cells. Integration, analysis, and interpretation of the omics data can lead to an important outcome that may prove significant for implementation in the direction of crop yield. This chapter summarizes stress responses in plants interms of biochemical and molecular pathways followed by the microbe-associated stress mitigation mechanism. Vigilant incorporation of high-throughput approaches supports a deeper knowledge generation of pathways involved in the alleviation of stress in organisms.
