Probiotics and Prebiotics

Abiotic stresses are the the most important challenges facing agriculture, due to preventing plants from realizing their full genetic potential for growth and reproduction. Hence, improving plant growth and productivity under stress conditions has gained high agricultural priority worldwide as the environmental stresses persistently limit choice of crops and agricultural production in many areas of the world. Over the past decades, advanced molecular techniques have been used to develope new crop varieties with enhanced stress tolerance. Benefits aside, molecular breeding as an effective trait in improvement of several crops comes with many potential drawbacks which significantly limit its potential outcomes. The application of some plant-associated microorganisms, including endophytic fungi opened up new possibilities for improving stress adaptation of the host plants growing under environmental stresses. In recent years, several studies have been carried out to decipher the molecular mechanisms underlying endophytes-mediated stress tolerance in agriculturally important plants. In the postgenomic era, omics-based approaches including genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics have been widely used as powerful techniques in the field of abiotic stress tolerance in crops; since they allow rapid identification of specific genes, proteins and metabolites that contribute to better plant performance under stress conditions. Also, plant endogenous small RNAs, including microRNAs (miRNAs) and small interfering RNA (siRNAs) play an important role in regulating plant defense machinery against environmental stresses. New information about the role of miRNAs during plant-microbe interaction led to exploiting the novel miRNAs and their targeted genes to generate stress-tolerant crops in future.