| Popis: |
Occurrence of abiotic stresses imposes devastating threat to global food security by causing more than 50% loss in crop yield and productivity. Under the scenario of global climate change, these abiotic stresses pose a serious challenge to ensure sustainable food production for the rapidly escalating world population. Plants respond to a wide range of adverse environmental conditions by dynamic regulation of various physiological, developmental, and biochemical pathways in order to tolerate stress and/or to sustain growth. A thorough understanding of such responses to abiotic stresses is, therefore, imperative to design tolerant crop varieties. In sugarcane, genetic advancements have been made by adopting novel crop breeding strategies to obtain improved varieties for abiotic stresses using novel biotechnological approaches, combined with approaches involving genetics, molecular biology, breeding, and physiology. Lately, transgenic approaches have been emerged as versatile tools to combat the adverse impacts of abiotic stresses on crop production and have proven to be one of the prospective ways for the genetic enhancement. Utilization of current molecular biology tools to determine the regulatory mechanisms for abiotic stress tolerance and engineering stress tolerant crops depends on the expression of specific set of stress-related or responsive genes. As a result, several abiotic stress-responsive genes have been identified, isolated, cloned and utilized for building stress tolerance in susceptible genotypes. Transgenic sugarcane lines carrying genes for abiotic stress tolerance have been developed by using Agrobacterium-based method besides other methods of gene transfer. Extensive research has been carried out in these areas and several transgenic sugarcane plants with enriched abiotic stress tolerance have been advanced for field trials. The present chapter summarizes studies on insights into the molecular responses and genetic manipulation of abiotic stress in sugarcane. |
