Drought tolerance improvement in crop plants: An integrated view from breeding to genomics

By L. Cattivelli, F. Rizza, Franz-Werner Badeck, E. Mazzucotelli, A. Mastrangelo, E. Francia, C. Marè, A. Tondelli, A. Stanca. 2008

1,462 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Drought is the most significant environmental stress in agriculture worldwide and improving yield under drought is a major goal of plant breeding. A review of breeding progress pointed out that selection for high yield in stress-free conditions has, to a certain extent, indirectly improved yield in many water-limiting conditions. Further progress requires the introduction of traits that reduce the gap between yield potential and actual yield in drought-prone environments. To achieve this three main approaches can now be exploited: (i) plant physiology has provided new insights and developed new tools to understand the complex network of drought-related traits, (ii) molecular genetics has discovered many QTLs affecting yield under drought or the expression of drought tolerance-related traits, (iii) molecular biology has provided genes useful either as candidate sequences to dissect QTLs or for a transgenic approach. The extent of information that breeders have now offers them new tools for breeding, such as markers for QTLs and single genes for plant transformation. Breeders are thus asked to blend together all knowledge on the traits sustaining yield under drought and to accumulate the most effective QTLs and/or transgenes into elite genotypes without detrimental effects on yield potential. This strategy will lead to new cultivars with high yield potential and high yield stability, that in turn will result in superior performance in dry environments.

Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Genetics, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/569ec240f7659a40e40ae5f930acaba3f29c78d3

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Citations in the corpus

Review: the interaction between rootstocks and cultivars (Vitis vinifera L.) to enhance drought tolerance in grapevine (2014, background): “the active accumulation of solutes involving inorganic solutes taken up from the substrate and organic solutes synthesised by the plant, is a response to drought that enables maintained water absorption and cell turgor pressure (Cattivelli et al. 2008).”
Breeding for Yield Potential and Stress Adaptation in Cereals (2008, background): “A recent review of breeding progress pointed out that selection for high yield in stress-free conditions has, to a certain extent, indirectly improved yield in many waterlimiting conditions (Cattivelli et al., 2008).”
Effect of terminal water stress on leaf epicuticular wax load, residual transpiration and grain yield in barley (2010, background): “It is becoming ever clearer that success in crop improvement, in terms of achieving stable yields under drought conditions, can be more efficient by including physiological and molecular traits in traditional breeding for crop improvement (Cattivelli et al. 2008).”
Physiological Responses of Selected Vegetable Crop Species to Water Stress (2019, background): “Studies have focused on the identification of drought tolerance-related traits using Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL)s and Marker Assisted Selection (MAS) techniques [41,44], however, the identification of the most relevant loci controlling drought tolerance and drought-related traits could be achieve”
Inducing drought tolerance in plants: recent advances. (2010, background): “…first attemptwasmade to clone QTL (Salvi and Tuberosa, 2005), which is indeed an important milestone inmolecular breeding, having a substantial role to understand and manipulate the traits responsible for drought tolerance (Tuberosa and Salvi, 2006; Tondelli et al., 2006; Cattivelli et al., 2008).”
Transgenic Plants for Abiotic Stress Resistance (2010, background): “However, many attempts to improve drought tolerance through breeding have been associated with reduced yield potential (Cattivelli et al. 2008).”