Phytoremediation, stress tolerance and bio fortification in crops through soilless culture

Abstract

Crop improvement through soilless cultivation opens up challenges of crop breeding, plant tissue culture and gene manipulation. The plant growing in soilless culture in a closed system, vertical farming, and protected cultivation under controlled climatic factors has immense potential for crop improvement in different aspects of phytoremediation, stress tolerance and bio fortification. The water-based culture and substrate-based culture induce classified stress tolerance in crops such as disease stress, water stress, salt stress under controlled climatic factors and can also be utilized to develop bio fortified crops. The scope and possibilities of crop improvement through water-based culture and substrate-based culture with respect to phytoremediation, stress tolerance, bio fortification, mechanisms of crop improvement and the challenges in crop improvement through soilless culture are reviewed in this paper. The soilless culture has enormous tools to combat problem of crop improvement and call for soilless green revolution. The comparative and non-comparative investigations of metabolomics, phenomics, genomics and proteomics, Donald concept-plant ideotype and Mendel theory-oligogenic and polygenic inheritance are essential to examine in natural & artificial system through soilless crop improvement.