Salinity Responses and Tolerance in Plants : Exploring Rnai, Genome Editing and Systems Biology

Soil salinity is a key abiotic-stress and poses serious threats to crop yields and quality of produce. Owing to the underlying complexity, conventional breeding programs have met with limited success. Even genetic engineering approaches, via transferring/overexpressing a single ‘direct action gene’ per event did not yield optimal results. Nevertheless, the biotechnological advents in last decade coupled with the availability of genomic sequences of major crops and model plants have opened new vistas for understanding salinity-responses and improving salinity tolerance in important glycophytic crops. Our goal is to summarize these findings for those who wish to understand and target the molecular mechanisms for producing salt-tolerant and high-yielding crops. Through this 2-volume book series, we critically assess the potential venues for imparting salt stress tolerance to major crops in the post-genomic era. Accordingly, perspectives on improving crop salinity tolerance by targeting the sensory, ion-transport and signaling mechanisms were presented in Volume 1.  Volume 2 now focuses on the potency of post-genomic era tools that include RNAi, genomic intervention, genome editing and systems biology approaches for producing salt tolerant crops.

​Dr. Shabir H. Wani is an Assistant Professor cum Scientist at the Mountain Research Centre for Field Crops, Khudwani Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India. He has published more than 100 papers/chapters in peer reviewed journals, and books of international and national repute. He is Review Editor of Frontiers in Plant Sciences, Switzerland. He is editor of SKUAST Journal of Research, and LS: An International journal of Life Sciences. He has also edited Ten books on current topics in crop Improvement published by CRC press, Taylor and Francis Group, USA and Springer in 2015 and 2016. His PhD research fetched the first prize in North zone at National level competition in India. He is the fellow of the Linnean Society of London and Society for Plant Research, India. He received various awards including Young Scientist Award (Agriculture) 2015, Young Scientist Award 2016, Young Achiever award 2016 by various prestigious scientific societies. He has also worked as a Visiting Scientist in the Department of Plant Soil and Microbial Sciences, Michigan State University, USA for the year 2016-17 under the Raman Post Doctoral Research Fellowship programme sponsored by University Grants Commission, Govt. of India, New Delhi. He is a member of the Crop Science Society of America.

Dr. P. Suprasanna (Ph.D. Genetics, Osmania University, Hyderabad) is a Senior Scientist and Head of Plant Stress Physiology & Biotechnology Group in the Nuclear Agriculture & Biotechnology Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, India. Dr. Suprasanna made significant contributions to crop biotechnology research through radiation induced mutagenesis, plant cell and tissue culture, genomics and abiotic stress tolerance. His research on radiation-induced mutagenesis and in vitro selection in sugarcane yielded several agronomically superior mutants for sugar yield and stress tolerance. He has made intensive efforts to apply radiation mutagenesis techniques in vegetatively propagated plants through collaborative research projects. He is actively associated with several national and international bodies (IAEA, Vienna) in the areas of radiation mutagenesis, plant biotechnology and biosafety.  He is the recipient of the “Award of Scientific & Technical Excellence” by the Department of Atomic Energy, Govt. of India and is the Fellow, Maharashtra Academy of Sciences, Andhra Pradesh Academy of Sciences, Telangana Academy of Sciences, Fellow, Association of Biotechnology, and Faculty Professor, Homi Bhabha National Institute, DAE. Dr. Suprasanna has published more than 225 research papers/ articlesin national & international journals and books. His research is centred on molecular understanding of abiotic stress (salinity, drought and arsenic) tolerance, and salt-stress adaptive mechanism in halophytic plants. The research group led by him on crop genomics has successfully identified novel microRNAs, early responsive genes besides validating the concept of redox regulation towards abiotic stress tolerance and plant productivity.

Dr. Lam-Son Phan Tran is Head of the Signaling Pathway Research Unit at RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science, Japan. He obtained his M.Sc. in Biotechnology in 1994 and Ph.D. in Biological Sciences in 1997, from Szent Istvan University, Hungary. After doing his postdoctoral research at the National Food Research Institute (1999-2000) and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology of Japan (2001), in October 2001, he joined the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences to work on the functional analyses of transcription factors and osmosensors in Arabidopsis plants under environmental stresses. In August 2007, he moved to the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA as a Senior Research Scientist to coordinate a research team working to discover soybean genes to be used for genetic engineering of drought-tolerant soybean plants. His current research interests are elucidation of the roles of phytohormones and their interactions in abiotic stress responses, as well as translational genomics of legume crops with the aim to enhance crop productivity under adverse environmental conditions. He has published over 125 peer-reviewed papers with more than 90 research and 35 review articles, contributed 8 book chapters to various book editions published by Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, and American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America and Soil Science Society of America. He has also edited 11 book volumes, including this one, for Springer and Elsevier.