Phenotyping Crop Plants for Physiological and Biochemical Traits
Contents: Section I: 1. Various methods of conducting crop experiments. Section II: 2. Seed physiological and biochemical traits. Section III: 3. Plant growth measurements. 4. Photosynthetic rates. 5. Drought tolerance traits. 6. Other drought tolerant traits. 7. Tissue water related traits. 8. Heat stress tolerance traits. 9. Oxidative stress tolerance traits. 10. Salinity tolerance traits. Section IV: 11. Kernel quality traits. 12. Carbohydrates and related enzymes. 13. Nitrogen compounds and related enzymes. 14. Other biochemical traits. 15. Plant pigments. 16. Growth regulators. Section V: 17. Analytical techniques.
Plants experience various environmental stresses and result in both general and specific effects on its growth and development. Tolerance or susceptibility to these stresses is complex phenomenon and plants exhibit a variety of responses to abiotic stresses viz., drought, temperature, salt, floods, oxidative stress which are depicted by symptomatic and quantitative changes in growth and morphology.
The challenge is to identify those responses that provide the most meaningful phenotypic information, to design sampling methods suitable for use in the field. Phenotyping involves measurement of observable attributes that reflect the biological functioning of gene variants (alleles) as affected by the environment. Although many studies reporting several physiological and molecular traits with the relevance to field applicability were reported, many of them are not simple, reliable and researcher friendly due to complicate procedures and high genotype and environment interaction.
This book elaborates various methods that can contribute to phenotyping of crop plants for various physiological and biochemical traits. They involve analysing methods for field-based assessment of these traits as well as laboratory - based analyses of tissue constituents in samples obtained from field-grown plants. Researchers or students working in this direction will have several options to select the reliable methodology according to the objective and experimenting conditions.
