This presentation gives the insight idea about drought and its effect on the plant system also talks about development of drought-tolerant variety for ensuring food security.

1. Drought Tolerance in Crops
Vikas Verma
Ph.D Research Scholar
190134010

2. Introduction
•Drought- resistance mechanisms
generally relate to drought
avoidance or drought tolerance.
Drought-avoidance mechanisms
include deep- root systems to
acquire soil moisture at lower
levels and plant characteristics to
reduce water losss, such as closed
stomata, leaf rolling, or waxy
susbtance on the leaf surface
.
•Usually heat and drought
tolerance are considered together
because high temperature and
drought often accompany each
other in the field.

3. (Source: ECHO, 2019)
Drought Status in India and World
(Source: FAO, 2020)

4. The different types of drought are related. Over time, meteorological drought results in
changes to the soil and stresses on crops that affect agricultural production. Eventually,
water levels in lakes and rivers become visibly reduced as hydrological drought ensues. The
impacts of drought on the economy, society, and environment cascade and deepen as
drought persists.
Types of Drought

5. Effect of Drought Stress on Plant
(Source: Muhammad N. et.al. 2019. Research Progress and Perspective on Drought Stress in
Legumes. International Journal of Molecular Sciences)

6. Mechanism of Drought Tolerance

7. Drought tolerance in crop improvement
There is a high correlation between tolerance to heat and tolerance to
desiccation. Comparatively resistance of plant genotypes may be observed by
exposure to high temperature, soil drought, or atmospheric drought.
 Like winter hardiness, plant genotype resistance to heat and drought stress in
the field is determined by complex physiological and morphological
characteristics and cannot be accurately evaluated by a single laboratory test.
Heat and drought stress resistance are quantitative characters with complex
inheritance.
Breeding for drought tolerance
1.Conventional methods Based on genetic variation & selection
2. Molecular breeding/biotechnological techniques Based on tags &
molecular markers
•To develop drought-tolerant genotypes, appropriate selection criteria must be
decided on.
•The extreme expression of phenotype of a trait of interest is not always
desirable and cannot be used as the best selection criterion in crop
improvement.

8. Various research and crop improvement in different crops

13. Rainout Shelter for Drought tolerance research
Climate change models predict reduced summer precipitations for most
European countries, including more frequent and extreme summer droughts.
 Rainout-shelters which intercept part of the natural precipitation provide an
effective tool to investigate effects of different precipitation levels on
biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.
(Source: D.Kundel et.al.(2018). Front. Environ. Sci. 6:14. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2018.00014)

14. Root System Architecture and Drought
•Root system architecture
(RSA) has been the target of
wheat research and breeding
to develop drought tolerant
cultivars.
•Through QTL analysis, DRO1
was identified as a regulator
of RSA by modulating root
growth angle in rice (Uga et
al., 2011, 2013).
•Notably, the wheat DRO1
orthologs share 76%
identitity with rice DRO1,
suggesting the likelihood of
functional similarity and
potential applications in
altering RSA for drought
avoidance in wheat.

15. Concluding Remarks
•The generation of novel plant varieties displaying tolerance to abiotic stress is highly
expected to cope with the unfavorable environmental challenges. Despite of the
current knowledge on the scientific bases of drought tolerance, more information is
needed to understand and be able to manipulate such complex Quantitative trait.
•The crop genome sequence combined with transcriptome, proteome, and
metabolome profiling of genes associated with various traits for drought tolerance
will aid in overcoming the challenges posed by genome complexity and facilitate the
analysis of genetic basis of drought tolerance in various crop plants
•Genome-editing systems, such as CRISPR/Cas9, CRISPR-Cpf1, and MAGESTIC, once
perfected, offer opportunities to appropriately edit crop genome to streamline
metabolic pathways involved in drought tolerance such as maize and barley.
•Integration of multi-discipline including physiology and molecular biology and
genomics may enhance our understanding of mechanism governing complex traits,
which should be useful in developing cultivars possesing both high yield and drought
tolerance.