RETRACTED CHAPTER: Impact of Biotic and Abiotic Stresses on Plants, and Their Responses

Abstract

The rapid increase in population growth and drastic climatic change remain challenging threats to agricultural crops, which are grown in diversified environments with both biotic and abiotic stresses. Diverse environmental stress conditions such as drought, heat, salinity, cold, or pathogenic infections are detrimental to plant growth and development. Plants grown under field conditions face a combination of different separate or concurrent abiotic and biotic stresses and in response plants employ diverse set of genes to alleviate the devastating impact on growth and development. Both conventional and biotechnological approaches of plant breeding are employed to reduce climate induced stresses in a wide range of crops. The development of diverse biophysiological and molecular markers has recently been employed for induction of stress tolerance in various crops. The introduction of modern genetic techniques plays a vital role in our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of biological stress tolerance. In this chapter, we provide an update on the stress combinations occurring in nature, their impact on plant growth, response of plants to stresses, complex interactions in stress combinations, combined drought and pathogen stress tolerance and role of genomics in developing crops with combined drought and pathogen stress tolerance.