Abiotic Stress-related Studies in Plants: Journey Towards Proteomics Era

摘要

Vicissitudes of environmental factors, both abiotic and biotic have been fore players towards considerable loss of crop yields over the years. Various approaches to overcome these hurdles in achieving the full potential of crop plants have heralded usinto green revolution through spurt of techniques developed by researchers across the globe. These techniques have utilized broadly three basic biological platforms, viz. genomics, transcriptomics and proreomics. Although there have been concerted efforts to improve plant stress tolerance, limited success has been achieved in engineering abiotic stress tolerance owing to its complex multigenic nature. In this regard, recent developments in analytical techniques which have enabled the analysis of proteomes of plants under stress condition are being considered a real boon. This review deals with the recent developments in the field of abiotic stress biology with special emphasis on salinity stress and the approaches being employed to engineer stress tolerance. Independent use of the aforesaid approaches have helped us better understand the complexities of stress responses and the available information has been tapped to steer our way towards improved genotypes for better performance under stress. However, there is no complacency as ever increasing population and shrinking resources not only demand for sustaining the achieved yield potential but also further increment. For this, better understanding of abiotic stress responses using a combination of several approaches needs to be undertaken which can help us address these issues more effectively.