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

Biological research: BR

Shah Fahad¹  Xudong Pan²  Daniel Kean Yuen Tan³  Ullah Najeeb⁴  Aziz Khan⁵ 

[1] Department of Plant Sciences and Technology, Huazhong Agriculture University, Wuhan, Peoples Republic of China;Key Laboratory of Plant Genetic and Breeding, College of Agriculture, Guangxi University, Nanning, Peoples Republic of China;Plant Breeding Institute, Sydney Institute of Agriculture, School of Life and Environmental Faculty of Science, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia;Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation, Centre for Plant Science, The University of Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia;The Key Laboratory of Oasis Eco-agriculture, Xinjiang Production and Construction Group, Shihezi University, Shihezi, Peoples Republic of China

关键词: Drought;    Leaf physiology;    Antioxidant;    CRISPR/Cas9;    miRNAs;    Climate change;    Phytohormones;    Zinc finger nuclease;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s40659-018-0198-z

学科分类：生物科学（综合）

来源: BioMed Central

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY