Soil salinity is a key abiotic-stress and poses serious threats to crop yields and quality of
produce. Owing to the underlying complexity conventional breeding programs have met with
limited success. Even genetic engineering approaches via transferring overexpressing a single
'direct action gene' per event did not yield optimal results. Nevertheless the
biotechnological advents in last decade coupled with the availability of genomic sequences of
major crops and model plants have opened new vistas for understanding salinity-responses and
improving salinity tolerance in important glycophytic crops. Our goal is to summarize these
findings for those who wish to understand and target the molecular mechanisms for producing
salt-tolerant and high-yielding crops. Through this 2-volume book series we critically assess
the potential venues for imparting salt stress tolerance to major crops in the post-genomic
era. Accordingly perspectives on improving crop salinity tolerance by targeting the sensory
ion-transport and signaling mechanisms were presented in Volume 1. Volume 2 now focuses on the
potency of post-genomic era tools that include RNAi genomic intervention genome editing and
systems biology approaches for producing salt tolerant crops.
