Grain Legumes and Fear of Salt Stress: Focus on Mechanisms and Management Strategies

Abstract

Salinity is an ever-present major constraint and a major threat to legume crops, particularly in areas with irrigated agriculture. Legumes demonstrate high sensitivity, especially during vegetative and reproductive phases. This review gives an overview of legumes sensitivity to salt stress (SS) and mechanisms to cope with salinity stress under unfavorable conditions. It also focuses on the promising management approaches, i.e., agronomic practices, breeding approaches, and genome editing techniques to improve performance of legumes under SS. Now, the onus is on researchers to comprehend the plants physiological and molecular mechanisms, in addition to various responses as part of their stress tolerance strategy. Due to their ability to fix biological nitrogen, high protein contents, dietary fiber, and essential mineral contents, legumes have become a fascinating group of plants. There is an immense need to develop SS tolerant legume varieties to meet growing demand of protein worldwide. This review covering crucial areas ranging from effects, mechanisms, and management strategies, may elucidate further the ways to develop SS-tolerant varieties and to produce legume crops in unfavorable environments.

Tolerance of Three Quinoa Cultivars (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) to Salinity and Alkalinity Stress During Germination Stage

“…The tolerance and the adaptability of a plant to stress conditions such as salinity or alkalinity are tested by the production of different organic compounds such as proline [35,36]. Studies, have shown that quinoa can tolerate moderate (150 mM NaCl) to high levels (750 mM NaCl) of salinity [15].…”

Salt-induced expression of intracellular vesicle trafficking genes, CaRab-GTP, and their association with Na+ accumulation in leaves of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

“…For example, their response to salinity in Genesis 836 was very different from that in Yubileiny. This may reflect the very different backgrounds of the chickpea accessions, resulting in genotype-specific responses, but may also reflect the multi-faceted response of plants to salt, which involves many other genes [61].…”

Transgenic Breeding Approaches for Improving Abiotic Stress Tolerance: Recent Progress and Future Perspectives

“…Moreover, phosphorylation of the SOS3 and SOS2 complexes leads to the activation of SOS1. As mentioned in Figure 8, the newly activated pathway of SOS3-SOS2 stimulates the transcription of SOS1 and stabilizes the cellular levels of SOS1 mRNA [130][131][132].…”

“…In rice, miR319, miR535, miR396b, and ONAC095 were reported to increase cold stress tolerance [47][48][49]147]. Additionally, PIF4 is a key facilitator for auxin biosynthesis and is also required for hypocotyl elongation and high temperature stress tolerance [131]. Xing and Zhang (2010) demonstrated that rice grain yield can be controlled by many quantitative trait loci (QTL) [178] and reported that independent or multiplex editing of these QTL can result in an improved yield [76].…”