Abiotic Stress Tolerance: From Gene Discovery in Model Organisms to Crop Improvement
a Purdue University, Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, 625 Agriculture Mall Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2010, USA
b University of Illinois, Department of Plant Biology, ERML 196, 1201 W. Gregory Dr., Urbana, IL 61801, USA
c University of California, Botany and Plant Sciences, 2150 Batchelor Hall, Institute for Integrative Genome Biology, Riverside, CA 92521, USA
1 To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail jian-kang.zhu{at}ucr.edu, fax 951-827-7115, tel. 951-827-7117.
Productive and sustainable agriculture necessitates growing plants in sub-optimal environments with less input of precious resources such as fresh water. For a better understanding and rapid improvement of abiotic stress tolerance, it is important to link physiological and biochemical work to molecular studies in genetically tractable model organisms. With the use of several technologies for the discovery of stress tolerance genes and their appropriate alleles, transgenic approaches to improving stress tolerance in crops remarkably parallels breeding principles with a greatly expanded germplasm base and will succeed eventually.