Bioprospecting of Genes from Microbes for Stress Management in Agricultural Crops

Abstract

At present, agricultural systems are under immense pressure to fulfill the increasing demand of food and feed in the context of global climate change with expanding populations. It is an established fact that the global temperature is likely to increase in upcoming decades resulting in the alteration of the edaphic attributes. The change in the edaphic factors due to climatic variations such as annual rainfall, events of drought and flood results in the decrease in soil fertility with water salinization which ultimately results in the reduction of crop yield. Hence in the contemporary era of scientific advancement, it is of central significance to develop mitigation strategies using analytical and forward looking concepts to fulfill the rapidly increasing food demands with ecological sustainability. In recent years, transgenic technology has proven to be very effective in terms of developing stress tolerant crops and use of microbes. This is a relatively simple alternative in terms of cost, unique properties, and ease of handling for broad-spectrum resistance/tolerance against combination of different stresses. Thus, the emphasis is now shifted to the bioprospecting of microbiota to explore the molecular and biochemical potential of microbes towards stress alleviation in crop plants. This book chapter includes an updated progress in microbial gene prospecting and their contemporary use in different plants to enhance their stress tolerance potential. Moreover, the chapter also emphasizes the different metabolic pathways which were previously targeted towards the development of stress tolerant plants and simultaneously proposed theoretical perspective and a baseline knowledge which could be further harnessed in future research towards sustainable agriculture and ecosystem.