Crop Production and Farming System

**3**

**Chapter 1**

**Abstract**

Effect of Abiotic Stress on Crops

Crop yield is mainly influenced by climatic factors, agronomic factors, pests and nutrient availability in the soil. Stress is any adverse environmental condition that hampers proper growth of plant. Abiotic stress creates adverse effect on multiple procedures of morphology, biochemistry and physiology that are directly connected with growth and yield of plant. Abiotic stress are quantitative trait hence genes linked to these traits can be identified and used to select desirable alleles responsible for tolerance in plant. Plants can initiate a number of molecular, cellular and physiological modifications to react to and adapt to abiotic stress. Crop productivity is significantly affected by drought, salinity and cold. Abiotic stress reduce water availability to plant roots by increasing water soluble salts in soil and plants suffer from increased osmotic pressure outside the root. Physiological changes include lowering of leaf osmotic potential, water potential and relative water content, creation of nutritional imbalance, enhancing relative stress injury or one or more combination of these factors. Morphological and biochemical changes include changes in root and shoot length, number of leaves, secondary metabolite (glycine betaine, proline, MDA, abscisic acid) accumulation in plant, source and sink ratio. Proposed chapter will concentrate on enhancing plant response to abiotic stress and

*Summy Yadav, Payal Modi, Akanksha Dave,* 

*Akdasbanu Vijapura, Disha Patel and Mohini Patel*

contemporary breeding application to increasing stress tolerance.

Plants in their physical environment face several types of variation. Animals use techniques to prevent the impacts of this variation but plants fail because of the sessile nature of the growth habit. Plants therefore, rely on their internal processes to survive changes in the external environment. Plants are affected to function in an oscillating environment and normal external changes are countered by internal changes without any harm to growth or development. The possibility of abiotic or environmental stress is to cause physical harm to the plant due to serious or chronic adverse environmental circumstances. Any adverse influence of inanimate factors on living beings in a fixed setting is described as abiotic stress. To substantially impact the organism's demographic output or individual physiology, the non-living factor must alter the surrounding beyond its ordinary variation range. Due to the continuous climate change and environmental deterioration induced by human activity, physical surrounding stress has become a key threat to food security. Water deficit stress, salt stress, imbalances in nutrients (including mineral toxicity and

**Keywords:** abiotic stress, drought, salinity, cold, heavy metals,

morpho-physiological and biochemical changes

**1. Introduction**
