Contribution of Genomics to Gene Discovery in Plant Abiotic Stress Responses

Sustaining agricultural production under adverse environmental conditions, such as drought and high salinity, represents a major challenge. The discovery of key genes and signal transduction pathways underlying plant responses to environmental stress will play an important role in developing strategies for the genetic improvement of crops to address this challenge. Crop functional genomics has greatly contributed to the identification of abiotic stress-related genes. Current advances in genomic technologies now provide effective and high-throughput methods for identifying stress-related genes at a genome-wide level, especially with the availability of the complete genomic sequence of several model and crop plant species. The development of genetic database resources has allowed bioinformatic approaches to identify stress-tolerant gene families across species based on homology and synteny. Additionally, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for complex trait loci in crops have facilitated the discovery of critical stress-related genes and their favorable alleles.