Crop drought stress and resistance

Summary:

Drought is the most critical risk for world food security due to shortage in water resources. Great famines has occurred in the past, water supply is limiting in the world and rapidly increasing world population will demand more stable food supplies. It is difficult to estimate drought severity as it relates on many factors like distribution and occurrence of rainfall, capacity of soil keeping moisture and evaporation interest (Wery et al., 1994).

Molecular mechanism of plant under drought investigated in the past has provided considerable information and studies going on to reveal more details (Hasegawa et al., 2000). Soil water deficit reduces crop yield by mainly three mechanisms: (i) decreased canopy attraction of photosynthetically active radiation, (ii) reduced radiation used efficiency and (iii) reduced harvest index (Earl and Davis, 2003). It is crucial to develop the drought tolerance of crops under the changing conditions. Reference Database: http://solanaceae.plantbiology.msu.edu/index.shtml

References:

1. Pieczynski M et al., “Genome-wide identification of genes involved in the potato response to drought indicates functional evolutionary conservation with Arabidopsis plants.”, Plant Biotechnol J, 2017 Aug 14;16(2):603-614
   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28718511