Abstract
Global warming leads to the concurrence of a number of abiotic and biotic stresses, thus affecting agricultural productivity. Occurrence of abiotic stresses can alter plant–pest interactions by enhancing host plant susceptibility to pathogenic organisms, insects, and by reducing competitive ability with weeds. On the contrary, some pests may alter plant response to abiotic stress factors. Therefore, systematic studies are pivotal to understand the effect of concurrent abiotic and biotic stress conditions on crop productivity. However, to date, a collective database on the occurrence of various stress combinations in agriculturally prominent areas is not available. This review attempts to assemble published information on this topic, with a particular focus on the impact of combined drought and pathogen stresses on crop productivity. In doing so, this review highlights some agriculturally important morpho-physiological traits that can be utilized to identify genotypes with combined stress tolerance. In addition, this review outlines potential role of recent genomic tools in deciphering combined stress tolerance in plants. This review will, therefore, be helpful for agronomists and field pathologists in assessing the impact of the interactions between drought and plant-pathogens on crop performance. Further, the review will be helpful for physiologists and molecular biologists to design agronomically relevant strategies for the development of broad spectrum stress tolerant crops.
Highlights
We provide a general overview of different stress combinations and their impact on agriculture and discuss in detail the effect of combined drought and pathogen infection on some important crops
We focus on drought and pathogen stress combination as a case study and discuss it as a model for understanding the impact of abiotic and biotic stress combinations on plants
One of the important diseases known to be aggravated by high temperature and water deficit conditions is dry root rot (DRR), caused by a necrotrophic fungus R. bataticola, Sharma and Pande (2013) have shown the interaction between R. bataticola and drought stress in laboratory conditions by infecting C. arietinum plants grown at different soil moisture contents with this fungi
Summary
Potential climate abnormalities associated with it, crops typically encounter an increased number of abiotic and biotic stress combinations, which severely affect their growth and yield (Mittler, 2006; Prasad et al, 2011; Atkinson et al, 2013; Narsai et al, 2013; Prasch and Sonnewald, 2013; Suzuki et al, 2014; Mahalingam, 2015; Pandey et al, 2015a; Ramegowda and Senthil-Kumar, 2015). Taking leads from some important studies on individual stresses, we have presented some of the potential traits which can be utilized for crop improvement under combined drought and pathogen infection. Concurrent pathogen infection helps plants to endure drought stress, resulting in increased yield (Supplementary Figure S3) (Davis et al, 2014).
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