Activation of drought tolerant traits in crops: endophytes as elicitors

Abstract

Drought challenges crop production worldwide. The issue is aggravated by frequent drought episodes and unpredictable rainfall patterns associated with global climate change. While the efforts to breed drought-resistant crop varieties are progressing, the need of the hour is immediate strategies to sustain the yields of existing ones. As per recent studies, stress adaptive traits can be activated using specific elicitors. Endophytes that inhabit host plants asymptomatically are natural elicitors/bio-stimulators capable of activating host gene expression, conferring several benefits to the hosts. This review discusses the scope of using trait-specific endophytes in activating drought adaptive traits in crop varieties.

The plant endomicrobiome: Structure and strategies to produce stress resilient future crop

“…Endophytes consists variety of latent pathogens, latent saprophytes, active beneficial and mutualistic bacteria, fungi, and rhizobia ( Narayanan and Glick, 2022 ; Ling et al, 2023 ). Plants are efficiently acquired, assemble and re-assemble their endophytic microbial partners at different developmental stages as well as environmental conditions ( Qian et al, 2021 ; Nataraja et al, 2022 ). Endophytes facilitate the successful establishment of symbiotic association with in plant and develop endomicrobiome ( Waqar et al, 2023 ; Chen et al, 2023 ).…”

Desert endophytic fungi improve reproductive, morphological, biochemical, yield and fruit quality characteristics of tomato under drought stress

“…The previous reports attempted to clarify this remarkable role of endophytes, but the mechanisms were not fully clear, principally related to the activation of the host response system (Khare, Mishra, & Arora, 2018); however, some mechanisms were evident such as the production of phytohormones and other efficacious secondary metabolites, induction expression of the stress-responsive genes and activation of silent gene clusters resulting in production metabolites (Dinesh, Srinivasan, TE, Anandaraj, & Srambikkal, 2017;Nataraja, Dhanyalakshmi, Govind, & Oelm€ uller, 2022).…”