Environmental Factors In Plants

Plants are exposed to number of environmental factors. Complex arrays of abiotic and biotic factors provide congenial conditions for plant growth and development. Slight change in these factors may cause stress condition. Abiotic stress is one of the most important factors affecting growth; this may results in severe loss of crop production. Exposure of plants to stress condition induces an interruption in plant metabolism at physiological costs (Bolton 2009; Massad et al., 2012). It leads reduction in fitness and eventually productivity (Shao et al., 2008). Plants perceive stress signals in well coordinated and efficient manner. From the perception of the stimulus (stress) to the final response in cells, plants use various signaling pathways.

Rich diversity of flora in general and minor millets in particular is available in Central Himalayas i.e., Uttarakhand state of India. Millet, which is one of the oldest foods known to human and possibly the first cereal grain to be used for domestic purposes is the main cereal food grain grown in the region. Foxtail millet [Setaria italica (L.) P. Beauv] is an important annual crop of the genus Setaria which belongs to family gramineae. It is a self pollinated crop (Leonard and Martin, 1963), cross pollination averaging about 4 per cent (Li et al., 1935). It produces long, cylindrical or lobed, bristly, condensed panicles. The small seeds, around 2 mm in diameter are encased in a thin, papery hull which is easily removed after threshing. It has been an important cereal since ancient times and has contributed greatly to human civilization (Lu et al., 2009). Foxtail millet is not just a cereal of the Old World, is also a crop widely used in Africa, Americas, Australia and Eurasia (Lin et al., 2012).
Foxtail millet possess several morpho-physiological adaptations that are associated with increased water use efficiency (WUE) including small leaf area, thickening of the cell walls and ability to form a dense root system (Li 1997). Due to high WUE (Hatfield et al., 2001) and low water requirement this crop may be planted as a second crop after wheat or barley. Short life cycle makes it

Foxtail millet (S. italica), exhibit numerous properties (for instance, C4 photosynthesis) that make it ideal models for functional genomics studies in the Panicoid grasses (Diao et al., 2014). With a high quality reference genome sequence (Bennetzen et al., 2012) and a high-density haplotype map of genome variation (Jia et al., 2013) and other genomic data, the accumulated genomic information for foxtail millet has reached the level where this species can now truly be considered a novel model