Drought Stress Impacts on Plants and Different Approaches to Alleviate Its Adverse Effects

Abstract

Drought stress, being the inevitable factor that exists in various environments without recognizing borders and no clear warning thereby hampering plant biomass production, quality, and energy. It is the key important environmental stress that occurs due to temperature dynamics, light intensity, and low rainfall. Despite this, its cumulative, not obvious impact and multidimensional nature severely affects the plant morphological, physiological, biochemical and molecular attributes with adverse impact on photosynthetic capacity. Coping with water scarcity, plants evolve various complex resistance and adaptation mechanisms including physiological and biochemical responses, which differ with species level. The sophisticated adaptation mechanisms and regularity network that improves the water stress tolerance and adaptation in plants are briefly discussed. Growth pattern and structural dynamics, reduction in transpiration loss through altering stomatal conductance and distribution, leaf rolling, root to shoot ratio dynamics, root length increment, accumulation of compatible solutes, enhancement in transpiration efficiency, osmotic and hormonal regulation, and delayed senescence are the strategies that are adopted by plants under water deficit. Approaches for drought stress alleviations are breeding strategies, molecular and genomics perspectives with special emphasis on the omics technology alteration i.e., metabolomics, proteomics, genomics, transcriptomics, glyomics and phenomics that improve the stress tolerance in plants. For drought stress induction, seed priming, growth hormones, osmoprotectants, silicon (Si), selenium (Se) and potassium application are worth using under drought stress conditions in plants. In addition, drought adaptation through microbes, hydrogel, nanoparticles applications and metabolic engineering techniques that regulate the antioxidant enzymes activity for adaptation to drought stress in plants, enhancing plant tolerance through maintenance in cell homeostasis and ameliorates the adverse effects of water stress are of great potential in agriculture.

Biochar and Its Broad Impacts in Soil Quality and Fertility, Nutrient Leaching and Crop Productivity: A Review

“…Soil salinity severely affects crop growth and yield, particularly in arid and semiarid areas of the world [126,127]. Globally, salt-affected areas occupied 1 billion ha, and it is estimated that this area will further expand due to global climate change and poor land and water resources management [128].…”

Anatomical Changes of Cultivated Plants under Combined Stress: An Urgent Need for Investigation

“…These processes may include all biological processes in stressful plants such as leaf photosynthesis (Fan et al 2020), metabolism of pollens (Nischal and Sharma 2020), and nearly all processes. The biochemical traits may include the antioxidant defense system and enzymes, whereas the physiological parameters may include all physiological processes like photosynthesis and the morphological features involve all features linked to the shape of plant organs like leaves, stems, and roots (Seleiman et al 2021). The anatomical features are still needed to be investigated in stressful plants.…”

“…Cultivated plants face generally during their growth environmental stresses including abiotic and biotic stress (El-Ramady et al 2019). These stresses include drought, salinity (Akcin et al 2017), waterlogging Tian et al 2021), high or low temperatures, high or low light, flooding, deficient or excess nutrients (Adejumo et al 2020) and heavy metals (Abdalla et al 2020;Stavridou et al 2021;Seleiman et al 2021). Several studies have been focused on the single or individual stress as a simple study but recently increasing concerns on combined stress have reported like drought and heat stress (Duc et al 2018;Parvathi et al 2020;Li et al 2021;Stavridou et al 2021), salinity and heat stress (Bayoumi et al 2021;Shalaby et al 2021), salinity and nutrient stress (Chrysargyris et al 2019;Pandey et al 2019), drought and pathogen infection (Dixit et al 2019;Gupta et al 2020), drought and element stress (Naz et al 2021), salinity and waterlogging stress (Duan et al 2018;Gill et al 2019;Cheng et al 2021), etc.…”

Post-Anthesis Mobilization of Stem Assimilates in Wheat under Induced Stress

“…Furthermore, due to reduced photosynthesis after anthesis, current photosynthetic assimilates reduced, gradually affecting the grain filling [16]. Severe environmental stress may reduce grain filling, leaf desiccation, and reduced photosynthesis [17][18][19]. Genotypes with the ability to mobilize the stem reserve under stress conditions are likely to yield better [13].…”