Tissue Culture: New Opportunities for Developing Biotic and Abiotic Tolerance Crop Varieties to Meet Global Food Security

In plants, stress is one of the major constraints affecting plant growth and yield, leading to a decrease in crop productivity. The stress can be abiotic or biotic stress, or both can affect crops. Biotic stress involves crop damage caused by living organisms, including insects, parasites, bacteria, fungi, and viruses, and affects crop yield. Abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, heat, water logging, mineral toxicity and frost limit crop productivity. The development of in vitro drought- and salt-tolerant crops, such as vegetables, cereals, fruits and other commercial plants, has contributed to food production. Worldwide, wheat and rice are the major crops and are affected by biotic and abiotic stresses. Conventional breeding techniques and several agronomic methods have been applied for the management of newly developed stresses. Moreover, most of the implemented methods were found to be less successful and undesirable for use in field trials or in greenhouses. Recently, the tissue culture method has proven to be a more powerful and cost-effective approach for the development of stress tolerance in plants. The in vitro plant tissue culture method requires less time and space, and experimental trials are performed under controlled environmental conditions, with high potential for the development of various stress-tolerant crop plants. This method allows a good understanding of the biochemistry and physiology of plants cultured under environmental stress in vitro. The tissue culture technique allows the development of various stress-tolerant crops in the laboratory and has improved tolerance to both abiotic and biotic stresses and improved yield. Therefore, in vitro plant tissue culture methods provide new opportunities for developing stress tolerance in crop plants for environmental sustainability.