Reframing plant stress tolerance in the era of climate change

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-80610-0_1

Currently every country is suffering from climate change and despite the ongoing efforts, there are still limited success stories for the improvement of plant abiotic stress resilience. The studies mainly focused on understanding the stress response and tolerance at the molecular level and utilizing it to another genotype with no tolerance. The strong interaction of plants with their environment is the main obstacle here, which prevents the outcomes of small-scale experiments to be repeated in the field. The inclusion of wild genotypes adapted to extreme environments in QTL studies and breeding efforts may stand as a promising approach for the improvement of abiotic stress tolerance. Agricultural practices including biostimulants, micronutrients and nanoparticles, genome editing, and engineering organelles can also lead to reduced yield loss. Understanding how stress memory is initiated and how to make it heritable even under favorable growth conditions is another approach that needs more investigation. The aim of this book chapter is to point out the fact that single efforts by themselves will not be enough for sustain-ability, and although there is still a gap between breeders, farmers, biodiversity scientists, agricultural engineers, molecular scientists, plant pathologists, and climate scientists, they should combine their knowledge to secure future generations.