Improving drought and salinity tolerance in wheat

Drought and salinity are major constraints on crop production and food security, and adversely affect entire countries over several years and result in serious social, economic, and environmental cost. Wheat production in the Mediterranean region is limited mainly by the availability of water resources. Water-deficit stress caused by drought and soil salinization adversely affects plant growth and crop productivity. This situation is compounded firstly by the predicted change in climate with increased temperatures and decreased precipitation as a result of global warming and secondly by the narrowness of genetic diversity of modern wheat cultivars due to domestication, selection and conventional breeding programs that minimizes plant tolerance to such stresses. The challenge of the majority of breeding programs, which are in continuous profit from the development of biotechnology, genetic engineering and genomic-based approaches, is the release of improved wheat cultivars able to withstand these adverse conditions. The identification of genes that control discrete agronomic traits, the mapping of QTLs (Quantitative Trait Loci) affecting tolerance to drought and salinity in model species and crops are powerful support for the development of functional markers, which will assist selection in the breeding process.