Developing Stress-Tolerant Plants Through In Vitro Tissue Culture: Family Brassicaceae

Abstract

Plant stress is an unfavourable environmental constraint affecting the plant growth and development leading to a worldwide loss in agricultural productivity. The environmental stress on plants can be biotic or abiotic. Biotic stress involves the damage caused by various living organisms including bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites and insects affecting the crop yield. Abiotic stress involves various environment factors including drought, salinity, heavy metal, high temperature and low temperature stress that affect the plant growth and development, leading to reduced crop yield. Brassicaceae being grown in arid and semiarid regions is severely affected by both biotic stresses and abiotic stresses. Various agronomic practices, conventional breeding methods and biotechnological approaches were used for the management of various stresses and development of stress tolerance in Brassicaceae. However, all these methods were found to be undesirable and less successful. Recently, tissue culture approach has proved to be more convenient and cost-effective technique for the development of stress tolerance in plants. The technique operating under controlled environmental conditions with less time and space has very high potential for the development of various stress-tolerant crop plants and is used for the understanding of physiology and biochemistry of plants cultured under various environmental stress conditions. Using tissue culture technique, various stress-tolerant Brassica crops are developed. Various stress-tolerant lines of Brassica were obtained by in vitro selection. These stress-tolerant lines of Brassicaceae showed improved tolerance to both biotic and stresses along with better yield. Therefore, in vitro selection technique provides new opportunities for improving stress tolerance in Brassicaceae for environmental sustainability.