Instant Insights: Drought-resistant crops
About this ebook
The first chapter assesses the genes involved in drought and heat tolerance, as well as the physiological traits related to increased tolerance to abiotic stress in wheat. It reviews advances in our understanding of the molecular markers associated with these physiological traits, and the roles of key genes in determining a wheat plant’s response to heat and drought stress.
The second chapter discusses mechanisms of drought resistance in rice. It reviews ways of assessing drought tolerance performance, identifying genes promoting drought tolerance through quantitative trait loci (QLT) analysis, as well as breeding for drought tolerance.
The third chapter highlights the genetic diversity and quantitative trait loci (QTL) associated with the traits contributing to drought and heat tolerance in soybean. It also reviews genomic resources that can facilitate a better understanding of phenotype-genotype associations and formulate genomic-assisted breeding strategies.
The final chapter addresses the polygenic nature of tolerance to drought and to heat in grain legumes. It reviews advances in understanding plant adaptation to stress, the assembly of molecular and phenotyping tools to support breeding and the development of tolerance through traditional and molecular breeding techniques.
About the author
Dr Nguyen is Curators' Distinguished Professor of Plant Genetics and Biotechnology at the University of Missouri, USA. He is former Director of the National Center for Soybean Biotechnology. Professor Nguyen is internationally recognized for his pioneering research into the molecular genetics of plant stress resistance as well a leading role in mapping the soybean genome. He is a Fellow of the Crop Science Society of America, the American Society of Agronomy and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Nguyen has also served on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Crop Science, Molecular Breeding, Frontier in Plant Science, Theoretical and Applied Genetics, BMC Genomics, and The Plant Genome.
Dr Shoba Sivasankar was formerly the Director of both the CGIAR Research Program on Grain Legumes and the Research Program on Dryland Cereals. She was based at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in India.
