181

Plant Breeding Approaches in Developing Stress Tolerance

6.6 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE PROSPECTS

Biotic and abiotic stresses in crop plants are big challenges from a decade to

overcome to feed humanity. Different conventional and molecular techniques

were used to improve crop yield and enhance overall crop productivity to

overcome this problem. The problem with breeding crops for biotic stresses

is that insect and disease species, and even races, differ from region to region,

making it impossible for a single cultivar to retain long-term resistance.

Pathogen recombination is another issue linked with breeding for biotic

stressors, as evidenced by the emergence of the Burewala CLCV strain in

Pakistan and the Ug99 rust pathogen in Africa. In this context, one cultivar

cannot control both pathogens, so the cultivar developed from breeding varies

from area to area. While discussing about abiotic stresses, different biotic

stresses affect plants in different ways. Some abiotic stresses are linked with

each other. Likewise, heat stress and drought stress are linked. When plants

suspect heat stress, there are maximum chances of drought stress to the plant.

To overcome these biotic and abiotic stresses, many plant breeders should

be encouraged to reintroduce methods like DH, broad hybridization, and

mutagenesis into their breeding programs. On the other hand, molecular tech­

niques like QTL mapping and marker-assisted breeding can develop cultivars.

It’s critical for the breeders with as many biotechnology tools as possible

because each stress-crop situation is unique, requiring one or a combination

of specialized biotechnological approaches to effectively address them.

In general, obtaining more thorough basic information of plant-stress

interactions will aid in a better understanding of how to alleviate abiotic and

biotic stressors and maybe allow for improved forecasts of plant response.

We predicted that in the near future, there would be a growing interest in

studying the processes of plant stress tolerance. Overall, we should need

well-elaborated, week-designed, and long-term field-related studies are

needed to assess the abiotic and biotic stressors.

KEYWORDS

amplified fragment length polymorphisms

cowpea trypsin inhibitor

pathogenesis

random amplified polymorphic

restriction fragment length polymorphisms

simple sequence repeats