Molecular Abiotic Stress Tolerans Strategies: From Genetic Engineering to Genome Editing Era

Abstract

In last decades, plants were increasingly subjected to multiple environmental abiotic stress factors as never before due to their stationary nature. Excess urbanization following the intense industrial applications introduced combinations of abiotic stresses as heat, drought, salinity, heavy metals etc. to plants in various intensities. Technological advancements brought novel biotechnological tools to the abiotic stress tolerance area as an alternative to time and money consuming traditional crop breeding activities as well as they brought vast majority of the problem themselves. Discoveries of single gene (as osmoprotectant, detoxyfying enzyme, transporter protein genes etc.) and multi gene (biomolecule synthesis, heat shock protein, regulatory transcription factor and signal transduction genes etc.) targets through functional genomic approaches identified abiotic stress responsive genes through EST based cDNA micro and macro arrays. In nowadays, genetic engineering and genome editing tools are present to transfer genes among different species and modify these target genes in site specific, even single nuclotide specific manner. This present chapter will evaluate genomic engineering approaches and applications targeting these abiotic stress tolerance responsive mechanisms as well as future prospects of genome editing applications in this field.