Use of QTL in Developing Stress Tolerance in Agronomic Crops

Abstract

Stress is any external factor that interferes with the normal functioning and growth of crops. Abiotic stress has been extensively studied for causing devastating loss to agronomic crop yield across the globe. These problems were worse than they are today. Currently, we have contemporary genomic tools to find the root cause of problems and we have to broaden our horizon in understanding stress tolerance. Current advancement in genomics has paved our path for a more precise and comprehensive description of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) that regulate a specific trait. QTLs enable researchers to study genes that are responsible for even a single phenotypic trait. In other words, they help to study which sets of genes are responsible for making crops tolerant to stress. Numerous studies have been conducted to describe QTL mapping a significant tool for finding traits against stress tolerance. QTL mapping enables to evaluate the numbers, locations, and gene action pattern. Polygenes affect controlling a trait. Moreover, QTL has provided ease to dissect complex traits. Phenotypic analysis of QTL is done by observing numerous plants from the same segregating population for finding loci for a trait. The QTL tolerance trait so far has been accomplished in major agronomic crops, which include wheat, rice, maize, cotton, etc. In conclusion, we can say that QTL mapping is a crucial technique to elucidate specific components that allow direct assessment of stress tolerance. Therefore, in this chapter, we tried to explicate different QTL studies exploited for trait improvement of various agronomic crops for stress tolerance.