Phytohormones: A Promising Alternative in Boosting Salinity Stress Tolerance in Plants

Abstract

In order to meet the food requirements of our growing population, the agricultural land has been expanded worldwide but still certain constraints (stress factors-abiotic and biotic) exist that limit the yield of many crops. These constraints/stress factors cause severe damage to the crop. These abiotic stresses including drought, salinity, cold and extreme temperature, etc. led to a drastic reduction in the yield of the number of crops and among all of these, salinity is becoming more severe problem day by day. Salinity hampers the growth and development of plants by inducing several changes like osmotic stress, ion toxicity, oxidative stress (ROS), membrane disorganisation, etc. and thus poses a major threat to agricultural yield. Several approaches have been applied to develop salt-tolerant plants to reduce the destruction of crops caused by salinity. In this regard, conventional breeding proved very tedious while in vitro techniques proved useful as they provide keen insight into plant’s physiology growing under stress conditions and thereby helps to develop stress-tolerant plants. In recent years, several salt-tolerant plants have also been developed using a transgenic approach involving genes involved in the biosynthesis of individual phytohormones. This chapter reviews in brief about the approaches used in the development of salt-stress-tolerant plants. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020.