ABSTRACT
Abiotic stresses are well known to alter plant growth and development globally. Their impacts are destructive and adversely affect crops at different stages of their life cycle. Abiotic stresses include drought, salinity, heat, and nutrients deficiency that are known to damage the agronomically essential crops. Thus, the need of the hour is to use advanced tools that understand the physiological, cellular, and molecular aspects including plant breeding and genomics approach to develop stress-tolerant crops efficiently. The holistic approach of understanding this coalescence of improving the crops under abiotic stress and the progress in the molecular technology includes application of biotechnological tools such as transgenics, marker-assisted breeding, targeted genome editing using clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)–CRISPR-associated protein 9, and bioinformatic tools. Thus, culminating research into the crosstalk signaling pathways, where plant growth hormones and their regulatory genes frame a multidimensional interactome under combined stress conditions. Besides the study of genome and transcriptome, the new era of proteome and metabolome has been utilized to understand their effect on photosynthetic pathways under abiotic stress. Water scarcity and nutrient deficiency are a major threat to 2food security worldwide and to cope up with drought stress, the transgenics approach seems promising. The new technologies have revolutionized the research and are extensively used to modify the target genes in crop plants that are important regulators during abiotic stress, which can further help in generating new varieties with novel stress-tolerant traits. The chapter will highlight the improvements in crop productivity by using advance ground-breaking techniques. Such advances are replacing the conventional techniques, not in terms of time and labor, but also in cost-effectiveness and thus promote agricultural sustainability and ensure food security globally.
