Abstract
Climate change, water scarcity, population growth, and food shortage are some of the threatening challenges being faced in today's world. Among different types of stresses, drought stress presents a persistent challenge for global food production, however, its harshness and intensity are supposed to expand in the imminent future. The most striking effects of drought stress on plants are stunted growth, severe damage to photosynthetic apparatus, reduction in photosynthesis, reduction in seed germination, and nutrient uptake. To deal with the destructive effect of drought stress on plants, it is necessary to consider its effects, mechanisms of action, the agronomic and genetic basis for sustainable management. Therefore, there is an urgent need for sustainable solutions to cope up with the negative impact of drought stress. This review focuses on the detrimental effects of drought stress on plants' morphological, physiological, and biochemical characteristics and recommends suitable drought management techniques to reduce the severity of drought stress. We summarize the effect of drought stress on physiological and biochemical parameters (such as germination, photosynthesis, biomass, water status, and nutrient uptake) and yield. Overall, in this article, we have reviewed the role of different phytohormones, osmolytes, exogenous compounds, proteins, plant growth-promoting microbes (PGPM), omics approaches, and genome editing technologies like clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR-associated protein 9 (CRISPR-Cas9) in alleviating drought effects in plants. We also proposed that developing drought-tolerant plant varieties requires the combined use of biotechnological and agronomic approaches and cutting-edge genome editing (GE) tools.
Highlights
Several driving forces are reshaping global food security, including population growth, drastic climate changes, water supplies, arable land availability, food availability, and biodiversity losses [1, 2]
This study revealed metabolites that are needed for various cellular processes, like the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, glycolysis, starch biosynthesis, and pentose phosphate pathway for regulating amino acid metabolism, peptide metabolism, carbohydrate metabolism, biosynthesis of purine and pyrimidine, were affected under heat and drought stress condition [204]
Different approaches like plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) and endophytes inoculation, seed priming with exogenous compounds, synthetic growth regulators, and genetic engineering are required to counter the negative impact of drought stress on crop plants
Summary
Several driving forces are reshaping global food security, including population growth, drastic climate changes, water supplies, arable land availability, food availability, and biodiversity losses [1, 2]. The plants are continually exposed to a wide range of climatic perturbations, leading to different types of abiotic stress conditions like drought, salinity, flooding, heat, cold, heavy metals contamination, and biotic stress conditions [3, 4] Among these factors, drought stress has become the most important and the key limiting factor that negatively affects crop productivity and eventually compromises food security [5]. The water shortage has been identified as a critical global and environmental issue [6] These stress conditions contribute to significant physiological, metabolic, and molecular changes in plants, causing a reduction in agricultural production [7]. This review highlights different management strategies for improving drought stress tolerance in different crop plants that can be achieved by developing droughttolerant plant genotypes, seed treatments, genetic modifications, application of plant growth microbes, plant mineral nutrients, and the use of compatible solutes
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