Advances in Molecular Breeding Toward Drought and Salt Tolerant Crops

Plant stress caused by drought and salinity are among the major constraints on crop production and food security worldwide. Breeding programs to improve crop yield in dry and saline environments have progressed slowly due to our limited understanding of the underlying physiological, biochemical, developmental, and genetic mechanisms that determine plant responses to these forms of stress, as well as to technical difficulties in combining favourable alleles to create the improved high yielding genotypes needed for these environments.

"Advances in Molecular Breeding toward Drought and Salt Tolerant Crops" seeks to integrate the most recent findings about key biological determinants of plant stress tolerance with modern crop improvement strategies. This volume is unique because is provides exceptionally wide coverage of current knowledge and expertise being applied in drought and salt tolerance research, spanning the scientific hierarchy from physiology, biochemistry, development, and genetics, to the newest technologies being used to manipulate drought and salinity associated traits for germplasm improvement. This book will be an invaluable reference for educators and researchers in agronomy and horticulture, crop breeding, molecular genetics, and biotechnology.

Plant Growth And Development Under Salinity Stress.- Regulation of root growth responses to water deficit.- Root growth response and functioning as an adaptation in water limiting soils.- regulating plant water status by stomatal control.- Eco-Physiological and Molecular-Genetic Determinants of Plant Cuticle Function in Drought and Salt Stress Tolerance.- Molecular and Physiological Responses to Water-Deficit Stress.- Integration Of Ca2+ In Plant Drought And Salt Stress Signal Transduction Pathways.- Phospholipid Signaling In Plant Response To Drought And Salt Stress.- Abscisic Acid In Plant Response And Adaptation To Drought And Salt Stress.- Small Rnas: Big Role In Abiotic Stress Tolerance Of Plants.- Transcriptome Analysis of Plant Drought and Salt Stress Response.- Comparative Metabolome Analysis of the Salt Response in Breeding Cultivars of Rice.- Root Signaling in Response to Drought and Salinity.- Biotechnology Approaches To Engineering Drought Tolerant Crop.- High Throughput Approaches For The Identification of Salt Tolerance Genes in Plants.- Dissecting Qtls For Tolerance to Drought and Salinity.- Induced Mutations For Enhancing Salinity Tolerance in Rice.- Participatory Breeding For Drought and Salt Tolerant Crops.- Requirements for Success in Marker-Assisted Breeding for Drought-Prone Environments.- Transgenic Plants for Dry and Saline Environments.- Breeding for Drought and Salt Tolerant Rice (Oryza Sativa L.): Progress and Perspectives.- Recent Advances in Breeding Wheat for Drought and Salt Stresses.- Recent Advances in Breeding Maize for Drought and Salinity Stress Tolerance.- Recent Advances in Breeding Barley for Drought and Saline Stress Tolerance.- Recent advances in breeding citrus for drought and saline stress tolerance.- Integrating Functional Genomics With Salinity and Water Deficit Stress Responses in Wine Grape - Vitis Vinifera.- Current Status Of Breeding Tomatoes For Salt And Drought Tolerance.- Recent Advances in Molecular Breeding of Cassava For Improved Drought Stress Tolerance.- Recent Advances in Genetic Engineering of Potato Crops For Drought and Saline Stress Tolerance.- Recent Advances in Breeding For Drought and Salt Stress Tolerance in Soybean.- Recent Advances And Future Prospective in Molecular Breeding of Cotton For Drought and Salinity Stress Tolerance.- Recent Advances in Molecular Breeding of Forage Crops For Improved Drought and Salt Stress Tolerance.