ABSTRACT
Abiotic stresses such as drought, heat, and salinity are the main limiting factors in crop production. The adverse effects of these stresses become more detrimental when they come together or appear in combinations. Despite numerous efforts to enhance plant performance under abiotic stress conditions, generating stress-tolerant plants has had limited success. Recent progress in identifying genes involved in protecting plants against environmental stresses provides new opportunities to enhance stress tolerance in plants. Crop improvements toward improving growth and yield production under combined abiotic stresses require modifying the expression of regulatory genes that control many downstream beneficial genes or functional genes that protect plants under multi-stress conditions. Careful selection and pyramiding of these target genes that perform synergistically toward improving multi-stress tolerance in transgenic crops will likely improve crop yield in field conditions in the future.
