Root Characters
Environmental stresses as major threats to global food security in the twenty-first century and improving biomass production and seed yield per area of crop plants become very critical. Plants are sessile organisms that cannot escape from environmental co
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Root Characters Silvas J. Prince, Raymond N. Mutava, Camila Pegoraro, Antonio Costa de Oliveira, and Henry T. Nguyen
Abstract Environmental stresses as major threats to global food security in the twenty-first century and improving biomass production and seed yield per area of crop plants become very critical. Plants are sessile organisms that cannot escape from environmental constraints, and as a result, they have evolved numerous adaptive responses to cope with environmental stresses. However, many biotic and abiotic responses start on roots through the sensing and response to environmental cues. Root-related abiotic stress factors such as drought, flooding, and soil salinity are already causing significant agricultural yield losses and will become even more prevalent in the coming decades due to the unpredictable climatic changes. Many scientists are starting to see roots as central to their efforts to produce crops with better yield efforts under stress environments. Alteration/ manipulation of root system architecture through any approaches holds the potential to increase plant yield and optimize the agricultural land use. Most environmental stresses share common effects and responses such as reduction of growth and photosynthesis, oxidative damage, hormonal changes, and the accumulation of numerous stress-related proteins. However, no root-related gene or QTL has been commercially deployed in crop plants for drought-tolerance improvement. As breeding programs rely on high-throughput strategies to select genotypes with desirable trait variation that are easy to apply, reliable, and affordable, genetic improvement of root traits is slow in progress. The results from several QTL studies also highlight the feasibility of marker-aided selection as an alternative to conventional labor-intensive, phenotypic screening of drought-avoidance root traits in crop plants. In addition, various applications of DNA sequencing technologies were also S.J. Prince • R.N. Mutava • H.T. Nguyen (*) National Center for Soybean Biotechnology, University of Missouri, 25 Agriculture Building, Columbia, MO 65211-7140, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Pegoraro • A.C. de Oliveira Plant Genomics and Breeding Center, School of Agronomy Eliseu Maciel, Federal University of Pelotas, 96010-610 Pelotas, RS, Brazil C. Kole (ed.), Genomics and Breeding for Climate-Resilient Crops, Vol. 2, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-37048-9_2, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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applied to understand the mechanism of root traits in relation to abiotic and biotic stress tolerance in crop plants. Thus recent studies in model and crop plants aid the researchers to explore the genetic mechanisms/genes involved in root development and its expression pattern under various biotic and abiotic stresses. Various research groups across the globe are actively involved in advancing the understanding of the root biology using multidisciplinary approaches. Recent advances in candidate gene approaches and genetic engineering of crops have show
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