Chapter 18 - Flooding Stress in Plants and Approaches to Overcome

Abstract

Climatic variability occurring naturally or due to human interventions poses serious threat to the global crop production. Different abiotic stress factors acting singly or together may substantially diminish crop growth and yield. Flooding also known as waterlogging or submergence is one of the major abiotic stresses experienced frequently by plants. Different plants adopt different strategies to protect themselves from this challenging stress. Although lot of information is available on the subject of different abiotic stresses, very little attention has been paid to flooding stress. Recent advancements in various “Omics” approaches (such as metabolomics) enable us to study various stress responses of crops at the molecular level. In the area of flooding plant stress, metabolomics, together with genomics and proteomics, could be suitably utilized to recognize novel genes and their functions. Furthermore, a combination of the three omics can be instrumental in identifying new metabolites, genes, and proteins involved in unknown metabolic pathways of flood tolerance. This review discusses various mechanisms of flood tolerance in plants and recent advancements to study these mechanisms.