Single-Versus Multigene Transfer Approaches for Crop Abiotic Stress Tolerance

Abstract Plants encounter an array of abiotic stresses throughout their life cycle. In the past few decades, understanding the complex molecular mechanisms of plant responses to abiotic stresses has been the major focus of research for plant scientists. For enhancing stress tolerance in plants, conventional breeding approaches were the early strategies, but with low success rates. The transgenic approach has emerged as the most promising approach of plant biotechnology for developing stress-tolerant crops. Under field conditions, plants can encounter multiple abiotic stresses, thus it is necessary to develop plants with multiple-stress tolerance. This can be achieved by transferring single genes with multiple roles, such as transcription factors, or by transferring multiple genes simultaneously into a plant system. This chapter highlights the potential of single- and multiple-gene transfer approaches in enhancing abiotic stress tolerance in plants. Moreover, we also discuss the limitations associated with these approaches and the prospects for improving them.