Molecular Genetic Approaches for the Identification of Candidate Cold Stress Tolerance Genes

Cold stress is one of the major causes to reduce yield in many plants among worldwide. The efforts to improve cold stress in crop plants had achieved minimal success through conventional, genetic engineering, and molecular breeding techniques. Crop plant activates metabolites, signal transduction, gene expression, and molecular network under stressful environment. Considerable progress has been anticipated through discovery of novel genes associated to stress, comparative genomic studies, and expression of gene pattern in response to abiotic stress. Therefore, it is necessary to understand physiological, molecular, and genetic response of plants under cold stress. The application of functional genomic strategies will provide basis of effective genetic engineering strategies to withstand crop plant under severe stressful conditions. Here in the current book chapter, we describe stress response mechanisms and omics approaches used in identifying stress-linked genes for the production of cold stress-tolerant crops.