Breeding for Abiotic Stresses in Plants (A Brief Introduction to Abiotic Stress)

What is Abiotic Stress

When any environmental factor interferes with the complete expression of a plant genotype then it is considered as abiotic stress. it can be due to any environmental factor like Temperature, drought, salinity etc.

Characteristics of Abiotic Stresses:

• Some of the Abiotic stresses are predictable while some can not be control. for example temperature or heat stress cannot be controlled on larger scale while we can control drought stress by providing irrigation.
• characteristics of abiotic stresses are vary according to their location
• they are different in different region and location and these stresses are the reason that we grow specific crops in a location. 
• stress can be occurred to different stage of plant growth and some stresses affect is normal at seedling stage while some of the stress cause loss of yield at high level at the stage of maturity.
• crops of different varities also shows lots of different mechanism to resist or tolerate these stresses.
• some stresses have combined affect for example the drought stress also induced the salinity stress in plant crops.
• some stress overlap the effect of other stress like salinity and drought stress, so we can make strain for drought resistance which would also be good for resistance against salinity stress.

How can we minimize the losses due to Abiotic Stresses

We can control these stresses to some extent by using two different strategies.

1. by doing efforts on crop management
2. by developing resistant varities

CROP MANAGEMENT:

the effect of stress on plants cause great yield loss and especially on the reproductive stage. we can minimize this loss by doing crop management which includes many agronomic practices

for example, at the time of drought stress, we can apply irrigation and at nutrient deficiency or salinity stress we can provide amendments and nutrients to the soil to overcome the stress on plant.

Why Crop Management is not Enough to reduce losses due to abiotic stresses? 

well, this is because crop management required practices on large level and also it is very costly as well as laborious method. we can not overcome the heat stress in larger fields so that's why crop management is good for small level but at larger level of crop production we need something more promising to reduce losses due to abiotic stresses.

DEVELOPMENT OF RESISTANT VARITIES

the second method to minimize the losses is to make resistant varities this method is more cheapest and easiest because we do not need crop management practices for this. a resistant variety can withstand the abiotic stresses and it can be even used on a land where normal varieties cannot survive. also this method is more ecofriendly