Salinity and Drought Tolerance in Plants by Ashwani Kumar

Salinity and Drought Tolerance in Plants by Ashwani Kumar

This edited book is a comprehensive collection of scientific research on different plants under drought and salt stress conditions. The main focus of this book is to elaborate on the mechanisms being operative in plants under stress and how various biological factors mitigate the adverse effects for better plant productivity. This book covers all physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms operating under drought and saline stresses. 

The current status and impact of drought and salinity on various crop plants have been elaborated on in different chapters. Agricultural lands are either turning barren or becoming more saline and drought-prone with increasing temperatures, decreasing water tables, untimely rainfall, and other environmental factors. In India, salt-affected soils occupy an area of about 6.73 million ha of which saline and sodic soils constitute roughly 40 and 60%, respectively. All these factors individually or cumulatively, affect the plant growth and development and hence, the crop productivity with the monetary loss. The inbuilt plant's ability with modified/acclimatized mechanisms has been described in various chapters with step-wise descriptions. The role of various plant growth-promoting agents including nano-particles, micro-organisms, metabolites or phytohormones, etc in mitigating adverse effects of drought and salinity has been explained precisely. Updated information on the use of speed breeding, proteomics, epigenetics, and transcriptomics in different crops along with high throughput technologies is included for the cross-talk of various network mechanisms. 

This book is helpful for the readers in knowing salinity and drought through the physiological, biochemical and genetic, and molecular levels to understand plant behaviour under stress conditions. Also, the book serves as additional reading material for undergraduate and graduate students of agriculture, plant physiology, biochemistry, forestry, and environmental sciences. National and international agricultural scientists and policymakers will also find this to be a useful read.

Dr. Ashwani KUMAR is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (Germany) and Professor Emeritus, Department of Botany, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India. He initially worked with Professor Dr. K. H. Neumann at the Institute of Plant Nutrition, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, on the photosynthetic apparatus in vitro and in vivo, and subsequently with Professor Dr. Sven Schubert on the physiology and role of enzymes in salinity stress resistance with support from an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. A former JSPS visiting professor to Japan, Dr. Kumar has published 220 research papers and 23 books. Currently, he is the President of the Indian Botanical Society.

Dr. Yuan-Yeu YAU (aka Frank Yau) received his B.Sc. in Botany from National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taiwan, and received his Master and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. He subsequently worked at the University of California Berkeley and the Plant Gene Expression Center (USDA-ARS) in Albany (California, USA); the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Full Professor); and Northeastern State University (Oklahoma, USA). His work focuses on developing clean-gene technologies using microbial site-specific recombination (SSR). He has also worked on cotton transformation and the production of anti-stroke drugs using molecular farming. He is an active member of Research Gate, a professional network for scientists and researchers.

Dr. Shinjiro OGITA has over two decades of experience in the field of plant biotechnology. In 1992, he began his research career as a master student at the Graduate School of Agriculture, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT), Japan. In 1997, he received his Ph.D. in Agriculture from the United Graduate School of Agriculture, TUAT, Japan. He is an expert on cell and tissue cultures, and on transformation technologies for higher plants. He is currently a full professor and director of the Field Sciences Center, Prefectural University of Hiroshima (PUH), Japan.

Dr. Renate SCHEIBE held the Chair of Plant Physiology until 2019, teaching on all aspects of plant physiology. Her research chiefly focuses on redox-regulation and energy metabolism; her interests include the molecular mechanisms for maintenance of redox-homeostasis in connection with stress adaptation, which she explores using approaches ranging from protein chemistry and enzymology, to ecophysiology. She has published more than 160 papers, and is now actively contributing to the scientific community with editorial tasks and as a member of the German Research Integrity group. She was elected as a Corresponding Member of the American Society of Plant Biologists and an Honorary Member of the German Botanical Society.