Maximizing Crop Resilience: Exploring Stay-Green Traits for Sustainable Agriculture and Crop Research

Abstract

The “stay-green” trait, distinguished by detained aging, sustain photosynthetic activity, nutrient use efficiency, offering critical advantages in drought, heat, and nutrient-deficient conditions. This review examines how "stay-green" traits can help crops better withstand the challenges of climate change, ensuring food security for a growing global population while conserving resources in the face of scarcity. This phenomenon is crucial in promoting yield stability, biomass production, and improved grain filling, thereby addressing the global demand for sustainable agriculture. This provides a detailed analysis of stay-green traits in various crops like maize, rice, wheat, barley, millets and fodder crops, emphasizing their genetic basis, physiological mechanisms, and practical applications like stay green trait enhance crop yield, drought and heat tolerance, nutrient use efficiency and resistance to abiotic stress by prolonging photosynthesis and delaying senescence. It explores into hormonal regulation, reactive oxygen species scavenging, and nutrient remobilization as underlying mechanisms. This paper also underscores advancements in phenotyping technologies and molecular breeding approaches, such as marker-assisted selection and CRISPR-Cas gene editing, for effectively incorporating stay-green traits into crop breeding programs. Real-world examples from cereals such as wheat, maize, and sorghum highlight the significant impact of stay-green traits on crop improvement. The potential of these traits is not limited to agricultural crops; they can also enhance the quality and marketability of horticultural produce. This review article focused on the emerging biotechnological tools, including nanotechnology and omics-based breeding, as future directions for enhancing stay-green traits and overall crop resilience. By integrating stay-green traits with broader stress tolerance strategies, this review advocates for a sustainable agricultural system that balances productivity and ecological conservation. The insights provided lay the groundwork for future research and innovation in developing resilient crop varieties to ensure climate variability presents concerns to global food security.