Emerging Technologies and Management of Crop Stress Tolerance

Chapter 5

Genetic Engineering of Crop Plants for Abiotic Stress Tolerance

Surbhi Goel and Bhawna Madan

Abiotic stresses such as drought, high salinity, oxidative stress, heavy metal toxicity, and temperature result in reduced crop productivity and limit the use of land for cultivation. One of the key challenges of the growing population is to increase agricultural land to meet food requirements. Therefore, it is required to use salt-affected land for agriculture. The traditional way to treat salt-affected soils is difficult and expensive. Hence, genetic engineering for developing stress-tolerant plants has proved to be a faster and efficient mechanism for improvement of crop varieties. In this chapter, transgenic plants overexpressing transcription ...