Coping with drought: stress and adaptive mechanisms, and management through cultural and molecular alternatives in cotton as vital constituents for plant stress resilience and fitness

Abstract

Increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and associated climatic variability is primarily responsible for inducing heat waves, flooding and drought stress. Among these, water scarcity is a major limitation to crop productivity. Water stress can severely reduce crop yield and both the severity and duration of the stress are critical. Water availability is a key driver for sustainable cotton production and its limitations can adversely affect physiological and biochemical processes of plants, leading towards lint yield reduction. Adaptation of crop husbandry techniques suitable for cotton crop requires a sound understanding of environmental factors, influencing cotton lint yield and fiber quality. Various defense mechanisms e.g. maintenance of membrane stability, carbon fixation rate, hormone regulation, generation of antioxidants and induction of stress proteins have been found play a vital role in plant survival under moisture stress. Plant molecular breeding plays a functional role to ascertain superior genes for important traits and can offer breeder ready markers for developing ideotypes. This review highlights drought-induced damage to cotton plants at structural, physiological and molecular levels. It also discusses the opportunities for increasing drought tolerance in cotton either through modern gene editing technology like clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR/Cas9), zinc finger nuclease, molecular breeding as well as through crop management, such as use of appropriate fertilization, growth regulator application and soil amendments.

Cotton leaf photosynthetic characteristics, biomass production, and their correlation analysis under different irrigation and phosphorus application

“…PN reflects photosynthetic capacity of crops and is the key driver to achieve the higher yield (Wang et al 2018). Moisture stress can significantly depress cotton photosynthetic rate and yield (Kaiser 1987, Pinheiro et al 2011, Khan et al 2018. In this experiment, under limited water and low phosphorus application, both PN and gs decreased and Ci increased.…”

Comparative Analysis of the Effect of Inorganic and Organic Chemicals with Silver Nanoparticles on Soybean under Flooding Stress

“…Changing climatic conditions caused tragic losses in crop productivity [2]. Under these changing climatic conditions, plants are at the forefront of different kinds of abiotic stresses including drought [3], cold [4,5], salinity [6], and heat stress [2]. Flooding is one of the most widely spread abiotic stresses that affects all the terrestrial plants by limiting the carbon dioxide, oxygen, ethylene, and nitric oxide those play important roles in signal transduction cascades [7].…”

Optimizing Dryland Crop Management to Regional Climate via Simulation. Part I: U.S. Southern High Plains Cotton Production

“…Because cotton yield variation is traceable in large part to water stress (Loka et al, 2011;Ullah et al, 2017;Khan et al, 2018), the timing and amount of growing season rainfall is the leading driver of yields in semi-arid dryland agriculture. As a result, identifying a climate-optimal management practice from a range of possible practices requires a broad sampling of seasonal rainfall outcomes and the resulting yields under each practice.…”