Functional genomics of abiotic stress tolerance in plants: A CRISPR approach

Abstract

Various abiotic stresses, such as drought, salinity, heat, flooding, ion toxicity and radiation are the major constraints to agricultural production. The understanding of molecular basis of plant response to these environmental conditions has been a major focus of research in the past decades. Several genes/pathways and regulatory networks involved in stress responses have been worked out employing various approaches. Quite a few of these components have been used for engineering abiotic stress tolerance in model and crop plants via classical biotechnological and/or breeding approaches. Success to generate stress-tolerant plants has been achieved to some extent, which has resulted in increased crop yield (Mickelbart et al., 2015). However, novel strategies are desirable to overcome the limitations of classical methods, such as lack of precision and requirement of substantial time to increase the crop production in the current climate change and ever increasing population scenario. The recent availability of genome editing tools provides ample opportunity to introduce targeted modifications in the genome efficiently to study the functional aspects of various components of the genome in diverse plants and offers potential avenues for production of abiotic stress-tolerant crop plants.