Crop production worldwide is focus to increasing environmental limitations , particularly to drought due to its high degree of impact and wide distribution. Conventional breeding approaches are trying to improve abiotic stress tolerance in crop plants, which have had some improvement, but are restricted by the quantitative nature of the traits. Maize is an important cereal crop. It is used as raw material in food, medicine and textile indust ries for the manufacturing of corn oil, corn flakes, dextrose, textile dyes livestock and poultry. Drought seriously affects plant growth from seedling to maturity. Mutation also proved to be tremendously important for evaluating functions for individual d rought tolerant genes due to the availability of knock - out mutants and its docility for genetic transformation. To produce hybrids it is needed to collect information about germplasm diversity, combining ability and heterotic pattern that is essential in m aximizing the effectiveness of the breeding programs. It will be helpful in selection of genotypes with improved yield. When genes for resistance to a particular disease or stress cannot be found in the available gene pool then mutation induction is the be st alternative. In this review, the response of plant to drought and mutation are described, the regulatory routes which allow plants to manage with drought are presented, and how the present information can be useful to obtain stress tolerant plants.
展开▼
