Impact of Combined Abiotic and Biotic Stresses on Plant Growth and Avenues for Crop Improvement by Exploiting Physio-morphological Traits

Abstract

Global warming leads to the concurrence of a number of abiotic and biotic stresses, thus affecting agricultural productivity. Occurrence of abiotic stresses can alter plant–pest interactions by enhancing host plant susceptibility to pathogenic organisms, insects, and by reducing competitive ability with weeds. On the contrary, some pests may alter plant response to abiotic stress factors. Therefore, systematic studies are pivotal to understand the effect of concurrent abiotic and biotic stress conditions on crop productivity. However, to date, a collective database on the occurrence of various stress combinations in agriculturally prominent areas is not available. This review attempts to assemble published information on this topic, with a particular focus on the impact of combined drought and pathogen stresses on crop productivity. In doing so, this review highlights some agriculturally important morpho-physiological traits that can be utilized to identify genotypes with combined stress tolerance. In addition, this review outlines potential role of recent genomic tools in deciphering combined stress tolerance in plants. This review will, therefore, be helpful for agronomists and field pathologists in assessing the impact of the interactions between drought and plant-pathogens on crop performance. Further, the review will be helpful for physiologists and molecular biologists to design agronomically relevant strategies for the development of broad spectrum stress tolerant crops.

Disappearing green: Shrubs decline and bryophytes increase with nine years of increased snow accumulation in the High Arctic

“…Negative effects resulting from deeper snow include increased winter soil and plant respiration due to warmer temperatures under the snow (Morgner et al., ; Semenchuk, Christiansen, Grogan, Elberling, & Cooper, ), increased early growing season soil moisture, and later phenology (Cooper et al., ; Semenchuk, Gillespie et al, ). In addition, tradeoffs resulting from increased allocation for growth may leave plants vulnerable to other threats such as pathogens (Pandey, Irulappan, Bagavathiannan, & Senthil‐Kumar, ), leading to negative outcomes over longer timeframes. In our site, negative impacts of deeper snow seemed to outweigh the positive, since we generally found a lower cover of living plants in enhanced snow regimes, whilst cover of dead plant material increased.…”

Strigolactones in plant adaptation to abiotic stresses: An emerging avenue of plant research

“…Plants encounter multiple environmental stresses during their entire life cycles. These environmental constraints, both biotic and abiotic, are the leading causes of crop loss and are threats to sustainable agriculture and ecological purposes worldwide (Abdelrahman, Burritt, & Tran, ; AbuQamar, Moustafa, & Tran, ; Millar & Bennett, ; Pandey, Irulappan, Bagavathiannan, & Senthil‐Kumar, ; Suzuki, Rivero, Shulaev, Blumwald, & Mittler, ; Zhu, ). As a survival strategy, plants have evolved various responses to adverse conditions by triggering a series of morpho‐physiological, biochemical, and molecular changes (Abdelrahman, Jogaiah, Burritt, & Tran, ; W. Li et al, ; Mostofa et al, ; Mostofa et al, ; Suzuki et al, ), all of which are perceived and controlled by signal transduction and reprogramming of genetic and metabolic pathways.…”

Heat‐stress Memory is Responsible for Acquired Thermotolerance inBangia fuscopurpurea

“…, Pandey et al. ). Increases in ambient temperature can cause heat stress and affect the survival, growth, development, and reproduction of plants (Barnabás et al.…”