Plants, being sessile and autotrophic in nature, must cope with challenging environmental aberrations and therefore have evolved various responsive or defensive mechanisms including stress sensing mechanisms, antioxidant system, signaling pathways, secondary metabolites biosynthesis, and other defensive pathways among which accumulation of osmolytes or osmo-protectants is an important phenomenon. Osmolytes with organic chemical nature termed as compatible solutes are highly soluble compounds with no net charge at physiological pH and nontoxic at higher concentrations to plant cells. Compatible solutes in plants involve compounds like proline, glycine betaine, polyamines, trehalose, raffinose family oligosaccharides, fructans, gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA), and sugar alcohols playing structural, physiological, biochemical, and signaling roles during normal plant growth and development. The current and sustaining problems of climate change and increasing world population has challenged global food security. To feed more than 9 billion, the estimated population by 2050, the yield of major crops needs to be increased 1.1–1.3% per year, which is mainly restricted by the yield ceiling. A major factor limiting the crop yield is the changing global environmental conditions which includes drought, salinity and extreme temperatures and are responsible for a reduction of crop yield in almost all the crop plants. This condition may worsen with a decrease in agricultural land or the loss of potential crop yields by 70%. Therefore, it is a challenging task for agricultural scientists to develop tolerant/resistant varieties against abiotic stresses.
The development of stress tolerant plant varieties through conventional breeding is very slow due to complex multigene traits. Engineering compatible solutes biosynthesis by deciphering the mechanism behind the abiotic tolerance or accumulation in plants cell is a potential emerging strategy to mitigate adverse effects of abiotic stresses and increase global crop production. However, detailed information on compatible solutes, including their sensing/signaling, biosynthesis, regulatory components, underlying biochemical mechanisms, crosstalk with other signaling pathways, and transgenic development have not been compiled into a single resource. Our book intends to fill this unmet need, with insight from recent advances in compatible solutes research on agriculturally important crop plants.
Dr. Shabir Hussain Wani Assistant Professor (Senior Scale) cum Scientist, Genetics and Plant Breeding at Mountain Research Centre for Field Crops, Khudwani, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, Srinagar J&K, India. He received Ph.D. degree in plant breeding and genetics on “transgenic rice for abiotic stress tolerance” from the Punjab Agricultural University Ludhiana, India. He then joined the Krishi Vigyan Kendra (Farm Science Centre) as program coordinator (i/c) at Senapati, Manipur, India. He teaches courses related to plant breeding, seed science and technology, and stress breeding and has published more than 200 papers/chapters in journals and books of international and national repute. He served as guest editor and reviews editor for journal Frontier in Plant Science (2015-2018). He has also edited several books on current topics in crop improvement for abiotic stress tolerance published by Springer Nature and CRC press USA. His Ph.D. research fetched first prize in the North Zone Competition, at national level, in India during 2009. He also received Young Scientist Award (Agriculture) 2015 from Society for Plant Research, Meerut, India. He also served as visiting Scientist at Department of Plant Soil and Microbial Sciences, Michigan State University, USA under the UGC Raman Post Doctoral Fellowship programme during 2016-17. He was elected as Fellow of Linnean Society of London 2017. Recently he was felicitated with Award for Excellence in Research 2020 from Novel Research Academy, Puducherry, India. Recently Dr. Wani was selected as member of Expert Working Group (EWG) Wheat Initiative for Adaptation of Wheat to Abiotic Stress (AWAS), Berlin, Germany during January 2021. He is also elected as Joint Secretary (Asia) for the Society for Plant Research, Vegetos (2021-2024). Currently, he is in charge of Wheat improvement programme at MRCFC Khudwani SKAUST Kashmir under the ICAR-All India Coordinated Improvement Project on Wheat and Barley.
Dr. Manu Pratap Gangola is a review editor for Plants (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, Basel, Switzerland), Nutrients (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, Basel, Switzerland), Cereal Research Communication (AkadémiaiKiadó, Hungary), Plant Genetic Resources (Cambridge University Press, UK), and International Journal of Agronomy (Hindawi Publishing Corporation, NY, USA). He works at the Department of Plant Sciences of University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Dr. Bharathi Raja Ramadoss is a Research Associate (Plant Breeding and Genetics) at the Bioriginal Food and Science Corporation, Saskatoon, Canada. He received his B.Sc degree in Agriculture and his M.Sc and Ph.D. degrees in Plant Breeding and Genetics from the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), India. He is the recipient of the global Monsanto-Beachell Borlaug International Scholarship -2012 for his Ph.D. research work entitled Allele Mining through EcoTILLING by sequencing for reduced starch digestibility in rice. He was also awarded Brig. Anil Adlakha Award -2016 for the best Ph.D. thesis in rice at TNAU, India. After obtaining his Ph.D. he worked as a research associate in the Department of Biotechnology, TNAU, India. He also worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Saskatchewan, Canada. He also cleared National Eligibility Test (NET) for Assistant professorship/Lectureship in Crop Improvement, Genetics and plant breeding conducted by the Agricultural Scientists Recruitment Board (ASRB), New Delhi. He has participated in several national and international conferences in the United States, Canada, Thailand, and India and also published 10 international 5 national 5 book chapters in peer-reviewed journals. He also served as a reviewer for various international journals (Frontiers in Nutrition, Frontiers in Genetics, Plant Genetic Resources – Cambridge University Press, Cereal Research Communication (Akadémiai Kiadó, Hungary) – Springer, and Starch – Wiley Publishers). Currently, he is working on improving gamma-linolenic acid (GLA) content in borage.
