Influence of Environmental Factors on Crops

Current agricultural productivity is unable to meet the food demand of a continuously increasing population. Out of over 7 billion people on the planet, 805 million are estimated to be chronically undernourished (http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/2014/en/). Agricultural productivity is greatly affected by unfavourable environmental factors to which crops are exposed. These environmental factors which decrease agricultural yield are referred to as stress and are divided into two categories – biotic stress and abiotic stress. Abiotic stress, which is the stress caused by non-biological components of the environment such as cold, drought, salinity, heat etc., is responsible for a high percentage of the total decrease in agricultural productivity. Rice is the staple food crop for approximately half the world’s population and constitutes approximately 20% of the global daily calorie uptake (http:// www.irri.org). Our laboratory, therefore, focuses mainly in elucidating the genetic basis of the response of crops, especially rice, to salinity stress, which along with drought is one of the major problems faced by farmers the world over. We have employed an integrated approach combining transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolmics, ionomics as well as functional genomics to help us obtain an understanding of the osmotic stress response of rice from a systems biology perspective.