Embracing new-generation 'omics' tools to improve drought tolerance in cereal and food-legume crops

Abstract

Drought stress presents a considerable threat to the global crop production. As a dominant source of vegetarian diet, cereals and grain-legumes remain crucial to meeting the growing dietary demands worldwide. Therefore, breeding cultivars of these staple crops with enhanced drought tolerance stands to be one of the most sustainable solutions to enhance food production in changing climate. Given the context, a more focused survey of environment-defined germplasm sets is imperative to comprehend such adaptive traits. In parallel, uncovering the genetic architecture and the molecular networks that collectively contribute towards drought tolerance is urgently required through rationally combining large-scale genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics data. Also, attention needs to be directed to reasonably quantify the epistatic as well as environmental influences, thereby warranting deployment of analyses like metaquantitative trait loci (QTL) that encompass multiple environments and diverse genetic backgrounds. Further, innovative techniques like genomic selection (GS) and genome wide association study (GWAS) would help to capture the quantitative variation underlying drought tolerance. Equally importantly, integration of physiological traits-based techniques with ever-evolving 'omics' technologies and the new-generation phenotyping platforms will be of immense importance in advancing our existing knowledge about the genetically-complex and poorly-understood phenomena, such as plant drought response, and a deeper understanding would likely to provide a great impetus to the progress of crop breeding for drought tolerance.

Differential response to water stress in two tropical common bean cultivars

“…In addition, researchers are putting effort to better understanding the traits in an attempt to select cultivars better adapted to water deficit (Zlatev, 2013). Hence, this particular stress condition affects all development stages (Singh et al, 2014); this study was done by applying three days of water stress induced by PEG 6000 in a hydroponic system using common bean (fully expanded first trifoliate leaf stage) to characterize physiological and biochemical parameters at early stage of two Brazilian cultivars widely cultivated.…”

“…For instance, almost half of global output bean productivity is from the semi-arid regions in Latin America (Broughton et al, 2003). Water deficit represents the major constraint leading to loss of yield in common bean by ranging about 50% due to the limitation of growth in at least one stage of the plant cycle (Singh et al, 2014).…”

Climate change adaptive capacity and smallholder farming in Trans-Mara East sub-County, Kenya

“…Among the key socio-economic impacts of the scenarios include shifts in the productivity of major cereal and horticultural crops (Singh et al 2015;Tittonell and Giller 2013) with a net adverse effects on the food security situations and income levels among many agricultural-dependent economies (Mertz et al 2009b). For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa, this situation is likely to disrupt huge proportions of their economies whose main contribution emanates from agriculture dominated by smallholder output (Moyo et al 2012;Mutunga et al 2017).…”

The Role of Major Transcription Factors in Solanaceous Food Crops under Different Stress Conditions: Current and Future Perspectives

“…In their natural environments, plants are persistently and simultaneously confronted to diverse biotic and abiotic stresses, whose impacts are enhanced by climate change resulting from anthropogenic activities because of dramatic population increases which resulted in restraining the water availability and upsurge the temperature [1]. The incidence of global drought is expected to grow beyond 20% by the end of this century [2]. The potential outcomes of these changes are low rainfall (water deficiency), increased marginal land and low water use efficiency, all of which would impact Solanaceous crops.…”