Drought Tolerance in Higher Plants: Genetical, Physiological and Molecular Biological Analysis

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. Drought and drought tolerance

   • J. B. Passioura

   Pages 1-5

3. The diversity of drought adaptation in the wide

   • P. Monneveux, E. Belhassen

   Pages 7-14

4. Drought perception by plants Do cells of droughted plants experience water stress?

   • François Tardieu

   Pages 15-26

5. Drought signal transduction in plants

   • Anders B. Jensen, Peter K. Busk, Mercé Figueras, M. Mar Albà, Giovanna Peracchia, Ramon Messeguer et al.

   Pages 27-32

6. Responses of plants to dehydration stress: a molecular analysis

   • Dorothea Bartels, Antonella Furini, Jonathan Ingram, Francesco Salamini

   Pages 33-40

7. Plant cellular responses to water deficit

   • John E. Mullet, Mark S. Whitsitt

   Pages 41-46

8. Mutants as tools to understand cellular and molecular drought tolerance mechanisms

   • Nicole Vartanian

   Pages 47-56

9. Crop responses to drought and the interpretation of adaptation

   • A. Blum

   Pages 57-70

10. Drought as a challenge for the plant breeder

    • S. Ceccarelli, S. Grando

    Pages 71-77

11. Defining selection criteria to improve yield under drought

    • R. A. Richards

    Pages 79-88

12. New molecular tools to improve the efficiency of breeding for increased drought resistance

    • Stephen A. Quarrie

    Pages 89-100

13. Back Matter

    Pages 101-104

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As drought tolerance is a multidirnensional stress, drought tolerance study is a multidisciplinary adventure. In 1992, the network INTERDROUGHT was created with the objective of joining the scientists of the different fields of research involved in drought tolerance study. The network was funded by the EEC and gathered 25 European teams specialized in molecular biology, physiology and geneties. 1\vo workshops were successively organized in 1993 in Sitges (Spain) and in 1994 in Ischia (Italy). After those two European workshops, the necessity of opening the network to the whole scientific community was already clear, and in 1995 the first INTERDROUGHT international conference was held in Montpellier (France). During this meeting, eleven speakers were invited to present a review in their field of research, in a way accessible to all researchers and students, especially those who are not familiar wlth one of the three fields of interest. These eleven reviews are presented in this book. From these reviews three major difficulties arose for drought tolerance irnprovement: - the definition of the drought stress that plants experience; -the differentiation between non adaptive and adaptive response to drought stress; -the identification of the adaptive responses that improved drought yield without decreasing significantly the potential yield. The use of integrated strategies of research will certainly provide irnportant results, such as the recent data obtained on molecular and physiologieal analysis of Arabidopsis mutants.

• biology
• cell
• development
• molecular biology
• physiology
• plant
• plant breeding
• plants
• water
• water stress

• UFR Génétique et Amélioration des Plantes, ENSA — INRA, Montpellier, France

  E. Belhassen

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