ABSTRACT

Adverse environmental conditions, especially drought, heat, salt, and nitrogen deficiency, are limiting factors for plant development and agricultural productivity. Plant genetic engineering using recombinant DNA technologies allows modification of genes and biological pathways involved in plant stress responses in important crops to produce new cultivars with enhanced abiotic stress tolerance and yield, alleviating the challenge of feeding the Earth's growing population. Biotechnology techniques work to genetically engineer plants through the regeneration of plants from single cells harboring introduced foreign genes, a process engaging chimeric gene construction, gene transfer to target plant cells, and the selection of transformed cells for plant regeneration. This allows for whole plants to be regenerated back from the transformed single cells or groups of cells. Genetic engineering approaches offer the possibility of breaking species barrier to introduce new and beneficial genes from various resources to a variety of target plants for cultivar development, providing highly efficient useful tools for genetically modifying crops to withstand various abiotic stress factors to improve plant development and promote sustainable agriculture.