Drought tolerance mechanisms and their breeding implications

Abstract: An increase in atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases and associated climatic variability is primarily responsible for inducing high heat waves and drought stress, affecting both plants and animals. Drought stress is one of the finest limitations to global agricultural production due to the problem of the water limiting environment and global climate change. It is critical to determine the plant response mechanisms to drought stress to reduce the impacts of drought stress on plants. Drought response mechanism includes morphological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular processes occurs in plants underlying drought stress. These processes include improvement in root structure, leaf structure, osmotic adjustment, relative water content, and stomata regulation. Moreover, calcium and phytohormone (Abscisic acid, Jasmonic acid, Salicylic acid, Auxins, Ethylene, and others) signaling pathways, as well as scavenging of reactive oxygen species are crucial mechanisms to cope with drought stress. To further elucidate and improve drought tolerance in plants, novel emerging approaches of plant breeding and biotechnological methods such as genome-wide association studies, mutational breeding, marker assisted breeding, double haploid production and CRISPR/cas genome editing serve as engineering tools for dissecting the in-depth physiological mechanisms. These techniques have well-established implications to understand plants’ adaptions to develop more tolerant varieties and minimize energy expenditure in response to stress as well as to fill the void that would otherwise result in growth resistance and yield loss. Hereby, this review highlights various mechanisms of drought tolerance and it also discuss new cutting-edge mechanisms of breeding to cope plants with drought stress. Keywords: Drought tolerance; CRISPR/Cas9; Antioxidant; Genetic engineering. Title: Drought tolerance mechanisms and their breeding implications Author: Gudeta Dida, Birhanu Babiye International Journal of Novel Research in Life Sciences ISSN 2394-966X Vol. 9, Issue 4, July 2022 - August 2022 Page No: 15-32 Novelty Journals Website: www.noveltyjournals.com Published date: 01-August-2022 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6948892 Paper Download Link (Source) https://www.noveltyjournals.com/upload/paper/Drought%20tolerance%20mechanisms-01082022-8.pdfInternational Journal of Novel Research in Life Sciences, ISSN 2394-966X, Novelty Journals, Website: www.noveltyjournals.co