Chapter 11 - Advances in understanding and engineering plant root system architecture to alleviate abiotic stress

Abstract

Climate change is threatening food security by negatively impacting crop productivity. Building up resistance traits that enable crops to withstand abiotic stresses is imperative. The plant root system, integral to all the essential uptake of water and nutrients uptake, has plasticity to environmental stress adaptation. Root system architecture (RSA) significantly contributes to plant growth and development, physiological functioning, and agronomic performance of plants. Root morphological traits play a key role in resource uptake which significantly contributes to crop yield and stress resilience. Among the RSA, stress-adaptive root traits are now considered the baseline for developing climate-resilient germplasm in a crop breeding program. Advances in root imaging through improvised tools of X-ray computed tomography, nuclear magnetic resonance microscopy, magnetic resonance imaging, laser scanning, as well as several imaging methods and software are now available for nondestructive automated phenotyping of RSA. At the molecular level, a cascade of cell signaling pathways, transcription reprogramming, changes in proteomic signatures, posttranslational modifications, and metabolite changes are observed in roots expressing traits of resilience. In this chapter, we have presented an account of RSA, the current understanding of root system, root traits of significance, and omics of plant RSA which are crucial to fine-tune the development of tolerance to abiotic stress conditions in crop plants.