Water deficit imposed by either drought or salinity brings about severe growth retardation and yield loss of crops. Since Brassica crops are important contributors to total oilseed production, it is urgently needed to develop tolerant cultivars to ensure yields under such adverse conditions. There are various physiochemical mechanisms for dealing with drought and salinity in plants at different...

Acclimation of plants with an abiotic stress can impart tolerance to some biotic stresses. Such a priming response has not been widely studied. In particular, little is known about enhanced defense capacity of drought stress acclimated plants to fungal and bacterial pathogens. Here we show that prior drought acclimation in Nicotiana benthamiana plants imparts tolerance to necrotrophic fungus, S...

one of the possible ways to ensure future food needs of an increasing world population involves the better water use through the development of crop varieties which need less water and are more tolerant to drought. in order to study the response of twenty landraces of bread wheat to drought stress, an experiment was conducted in a randomized complete block design with three replications under t...

Green Revolution (GR) rice varieties are high yielding but typically drought sensitive. This is partly due to the tight linkage between the loci governing plant height and drought tolerance. This linkage is illustrated here through characterization of qDTY1.1, a QTL for grain yield under drought that co-segregates with the GR gene sd1 for semi-dwarf plant height. We report that the loss of the ...

Plants inhabiting degraded habitats must contend with stressful environments. However, their ability to adapt may be constrained by available genetic variation and genetic correlations between traits. Here, we examine the correlation between salt and drought tolerance in germinating seeds from contrasting populations of common teasel (Dipsacus fullonum subsp. sylvestris) growing on roadsides th...

the sucrose non-fermenting 1-related protein kinase 2 (snrk2) family members are plant unique serine/threonine kinases which play a key role in cellular signaling in response to abiotic stresses. the three snrk2 members including srk2d, srk2i and srk2e are known to phosphorylate major abscisic acid (aba) responsive transcription factors, abf2 and abf4, involved in an aba-dependent stress signal...

To study the role of abscisic acid (ABA) in development of freezing tolerance of Arabidopsis thaliana, we exposed wild-type plants, the ABA-insensitive mutant abi1, and the ABA-deficient mutant aba-1 to low temperature (LT), exogenous ABA, and drought. Exposure of A. thaliana to drought stress resulted in a similar increase in freezing tolerance as achieved by ABA treatment or the initial stage...

The growth and yield of many crops, including cotton, are affected by water deficit. Cotton has evolved drought specific as well as general morpho-physiological, biochemical and molecular responses to drought stress, which are discussed in this review. The key physiological responses against drought stress in cotton, including stomata closing, root development, cellular adaptations, photosynthe...