ABSTRACT
The climate change is adversely affecting the crop production and increasing the intensity of biotic and abiotic stresses. The abiotic stresses such as drought, heat, salinity, waterlogging, flooding, heavy metals, and lodging are hampering the crop productivity of all major crops of economic importance around the globe. The plants are sessile, hence cannot escape the stress by moving away from the stressed environment. Therefore, plants have to adjust their metabolic activities to respond to stress and survive under unfavorable climatic conditions. Wild plants have evolved different stress responsive mechanisms by switching on the stress responsive genes through signal transduction pathways. However, the cultivated plants have lost the stress tolerance mechanism during focused selection for improved yield. Now scientists are using different forward and reverse genetic approaches to equip the cultivated plant species with stress tolerance genes to enable them better survive in the changing climate. The current book chapter summarizes the existing knowledge about different forward and reverse genetic approaches and their use in plant breeding for development of abiotic stress tolerant crop varieties. Further, it highlights the role of different online crop improvement tools which are helping plant scientists in developing climate resilient crops through different crop improvement techniques.
