Abstract
Drought is one of the most important phenomena which limit crops' production and yield. Crops demonstrate various morphological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular responses to tackle drought stress. Plants' vegetative and reproductive stages are intensively influenced by drought stress. Drought tolerance is a complicated trait which is controlled by polygenes and their expressions are influenced by various environmental elements. This means that breeding for this trait is so difficult and new molecular methods such as molecular markers, quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping strategies, and expression patterns of genes should be applied to produce drought tolerant genotypes. In wheat, there are several genes which are responsible for drought stress tolerance and produce different types of enzymes and proteins for instance, late embryogenesis abundant (lea), responsive to abscisic acid (Rab), rubisco, helicase, proline, glutathione-S-transferase (GST), and carbohydrates during drought stress. This review paper has concentrated on the study of water limitation and its effects on morphological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular responses of wheat with the possible losses caused by drought stress.
Highlights
Drought is one of the most common environmental stresses that affect growth and development of plants
When the correlation between a molecular marker and a trait is greater than the heritability of the trait, marker assisted selection may be advantageous. These results suggest the usefulness of molecular markers to enhance drought tolerance in durum wheat in drought condition [131]
Rapid improvements can be performed in drought resistance by manipulating the genes which are responsible for the plant growth regulators, antioxidants, proteins, and transcriptional factors [149]
Summary
Drought is one of the most common environmental stresses that affect growth and development of plants. Drought avoidance includes root depth, reasonable use of available water by plants, and changes in plants’ lifestyle to use rainfall. Many factors can affect plants’ responses to drought stress such as plant genotype, growth stage, severity and duration of stress, physiological process of growth [5], different patterns of genes expression [6], different patterns of the activity of respiration [7], activity of photosynthesis machinery [8], and environmental factors [4, 9]. Drought stress can have effects on genes expression, and detection of genes during water stress is crucial to observe their responses. An attempt is made to explore different research information on wheat drought tolerance in various aspects, namely, morphological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular responses
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