Profile of the Instructor
Dr. Trivedi did his Ph.D. from Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow in the field of Structural Biology. He has extensive experience to run online courses on MOOCS platform and his teaching domain lies in the area of molecular cloning, protein production and biochemical characterization. He received several awards such as young scientist award from National academy of sciences-India, young scientist award from DST-SERB, young scientist award from DAE-BRNS.
Veena N H –
Good Morning Sir/Madam
I am Veena N H, Research Scholar, Department of Botany, Davangere University, Davanagere. My area of interest is Plant Molecular Stress Physiology. Abiotic stress is caused by the non living matters that are external environmental factors like water, light, temperature, salt concentration in the soil etc. The deficiency or sufficiency of these factors can cause a stress in plants. The abiotic factors like temperature, light, salinity, chilling, drought, these are major factors may affect directly or indirectly on plant growth and development. These abiotic stresses affect negatively on agricultural crop fields and losses yield up to 50%. According to Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) about 28% of the crops are affected by drought stress, and about 20% of the crops are affected by salt stress in world wide area so, salt and drought stresses are consider as major abiotic stress and it directly affect on the productivity and quality of crops or food grains. Only 9% of the world area is suitable for agriculture without any abiotic stress remaining 91% of the land is affected by combination of abiotic stresses, in that we losses about 50% of the productivity from crop plants. So it is major challenge for balancing a food for growing population.
Primary abiotic stress induce secondary stresses including oxidative stress and osmotic stress. The plants sense variability in their homeostatic status and activate their stress-related signaling pathways including ROS signaling, calcium-mediated signaling, hormonal signaling, and transcriptional networking. Stress signaling triggers stress-responsive mechanisms. Successful stress response involves tolerance or resistance to abiotic stress with restoration of cellular homeostasis and repair of damaged proteins and membrane. On the other side, inadequate stress response can lead to irreversible cellular damage followed by cell death. Various conventional and advance approaches are under consideration to avoid inadequate stress response in agronomical important crop plants, thus avoiding threat to food security.
Unlike animals, plants are sessile organisms and thus are bound to grow in the same habitat fighting with various environmental factors termed as abiotic stress. In the era of climate change, plants are constantly suffering from various abiotic stresses like salinity, drought, extreme temperature, flooding, metal toxicity, air pollution, ozone, UV radiation, and so on. These episodes are becoming more common due to rapid changes in climate. These stressors, alone or in combination, attack plants, and thus the consequence is often unpredictable and becomes more severe than we expect. These effects are also greatly varied with the type and duration/extent of stresses and also depend on the plant species and genotypes. Therefore, it is very difficult to generalize the common effect of abiotic stress in plants. However, the major effects of abiotic stress in plants includes loss of seed germination, growth inhibition, disruption of energy assimilation and photosynthesis, imbalance in metabolism, imbalance in nutrient homeostasis and nutrient uptake, reduction of crop yield, and deterioration in crop quality. The most crucial aspect in mitigating stress in plants is to understand fine level molecular machinery and its networks operative under stress conditions. This includes elaborative elucidation of abundance of metabolic pathways and their regulatory genes in the plant varieties. Identification of multigenic traits involved in stress responses, exploration of linked markers for such genes, and investigation of the probabilities to pool out important genes through breeding programs is the current focus of stress mitigation strategies. Other strategies that have put forward for the alleviation of abiotic stresses in plants include the use of various biomolecules of plant and microbial origin. These approaches are opening new gateways for scientists to dig out novel methods to alleviate the abiotic stresses in field grown plants.