Soil, air and water pollution have become a global problem due to unprocessed emission of toxic heavy metals into the environment. The uncontrolled increase in release of hazardous heavy metals such as arsenic into the soil and water is mainly due to the untreated industrial waste. The accumulation of heavy metals causes damage not only to soil and water flora but also have deleterious effects on human health. The conventional methods such as thermal treatment, excavation and land fill, electro-reclamation and acid leaching used for degradation were time and cost consuming with release of toxic products. In nature, there are microorganisms residing in soil, which are capable of degrading toxic metals through phytoremediation. In phytoremediation, rhizobacteria play an important role. Rhizobacteria not only prevent contaminated soil's fertility but also enhance the growth of plants by release of special plant growth hormones. Phytohormones secreted by plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) are major chemicals involved in metal uptake. This in situ and environment friendly method of bioremediation is cost effective and efficient. The advance techniques such as genetic engineering have been introduced to increase the spectrum and degrading capacity of rhizobacteria.

Aloe vera is a well-known medicinal plant used in many therapeutic purposes. Naturally it is composed of many useful compounds that have ability to use for treatment of many diseases. The active compounds reported in this plant are saponins, sugar, enzymes, vitamins, aloesin, aloeemodin, aloin, acemannan aloemannan, aloeride, methylchromones, flavonoids, naftoquinones, sterols, minerals, anthraquinones, amino acids, lignin and salicylic acid and other different compounds including fat-soluble and water-soluble vitamins, enzymes, minerals, simple/complex sugars, organic acid and phenolic compounds. In this study aloe vera is used for antibacterial and antifulgal activity against different strains of bacteria and pathogenic fungal strains. Ethanol extract of Aloe vera leaves and roots is applied on these bacterial and fungal strains in different concentrations (15, 20, 25, 30µl). Bacillus cereus, Bacillus subtitis, Bacillus megaterium, Streptococcus pyogenes, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter baumannii, and some other bacterial strains are used for this study. Escherichia coli and Agrobacterium tumefacins shows zone of inhibition around 18mm which consider as good result. Bacillus subtitis and Bacillus megaterium also shows good result around 16mm. Proteus mirabilis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa shows minimum zone of inhibition which is around 11mm. among all used fungal strains (fuserium oxysporum, Candida albicans, Aspergillus fumigatus, Aspergillus niger) fuserium oxysporum and Aspergillus niger shows excellent results around 19mm both against root extract and leaves extract.

Phenotypic stability under stress environment facilitate the fitness of genotype and opens new horizons to explore the cryptic genetic variation. Variation in tolerance to drought stress, a major grain yield constraint to global maize production, was identified, at the phenotypic and genotypic level. Here we found a prominent hybrid H9 that showed fitness over four growing seasons for grain yield under water stress conditions. Genotypic and phenotypic correlation of yield attributing traits over four seasons demonstrated that cobs per plant, 100 seed weight, number of grains rows per cob, total dry matter, cob diameter had positive association (r2 = 0.3-0.9) to grain yield. The perturbation was found for chlorophyll content as it showed moderate to strong association (P < 0.01) over four seasons, might be due to environment or genotype dependent. Highest heritability (95%) and genetic advance (79%) for grain yield was found in H9 over four consecutive crop growing seasons. Combined analysis over four seasons showed that studied variables together explained 85 % of total variation in dependent structure (grain yield) obtained by principle component analysis. This significant finding is the best example of phenotypic stability of grain yield in H9 and made it best fitted for grain yield under drought stress scenario. Detailed genetic analysis of H9 will help us to identify significant loci and alleles that made H9 the best fitted and it could serve as a potential source to generate novel transgressive levels of tolerance for drought stress in arid/semiarid regions.

Cucumber is an important vegetable but highly sensitive to salt stress. The present study was designed to investigate the comparative performance of cucumber genotypes under salt stress (50 mmol L⁻¹) and stress alleviation through an optimized level of triacontanol @ 0.8 mg L⁻¹. Four cucumber genotypes were subjected to foliar application of triacontanol under stress. Different physiological, biochemical, water relations and ionic traits were observed to determine the role of triacontanol in salt stress alleviation. Triacontanol ameliorated the lethal impact of salt stress in all genotypes, but Green long and Marketmore were more responsive than Summer green and 20252 in almost all the attributes that define the genetic potential of genotypes. Triacontanol performs as a good scavenger of ROS by accelerating the activity of antioxidant enzymes (SOD, POD, CAT) and compatible solutes (proline, glycinebetaine, phenolic contents), which lead to improved gas exchange attributes and water relations and in that way enhance the calcium and potassium contents or decline the sodium and chloride contents in cucumber leaves. Furthermore, triacontanol feeding also shows the answer to yield traits of cucumber. It was concluded from the results that the salinity tolerance efficacy of triacontanol is valid in enhancing the productivity of cucumber plants under salt stress. Triacontanol was more pronounced in green long and marketer green than in summer green and 20252. Hence, the findings of this study pave the way towards the usage of triacontanol @ 0.8 mg L⁻¹, and green long and marketer genotypes may be recommended for saline soil.

Maize Chlorotic Mottle Virus (MCMV) is a deleterious pathogen which causes Maize Lethal Necrosis Disease that result in substantial yield loss of Maize crop worldwide. The positive-sense RNA genome of MCMV (4.4 kb) encodes six proteins: P32 (32kDa protein), RNA dependent RNA polymerases (P50 and P111), P31 (31kDa protein), P7 (7kDa protein), coat protein (25 kDa). P31, P7 and coat protein are encoded from sgRNA1, located at the 3′end of the genome and sgRNA2, located at the extremity of the 3′genome end. The objective of this study is to locate the possible attachment sites of Zea mays derived miRNAs in the genome of MCMV, using four diverse efficient miRNA target prediction algorithms. In total, 321 mature miRNAs were retrieved from miRBase (miRNA database) and were tested for hybridization of MCMV. These algorithms considered the parameters of seed pairing, minimum free energy, target site accessibility, multiple target sites, pattern recognition and folding energy for attachment. Out of 321 only 10 most efficient maize miRNAs are predicted for silencing of MCMV genome. The results of this study can hence act as the first step towards the development of MCMV resistant transgenic Maize plants through expression of the selected miRNAs.

The field of biotechnology has extraordinary influence on science, law, the administrative condition social insurance, and business throughout the world. As the starting of agriculture, people have been manipulating crops to improve the yield and quantity. Product yields throughout the world are essentially diminished by the activity of herbivorous insects, pathogens, and parasites. Natural environmental stresses make this circumstance significantly worse. Biotechnology can be used to increase the yield of food crops, to improve biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, to modify the traits of the plant (e.g. oil content, percentage of lignin, cell structure), to make the conversion to liquid biofuels more efficient. Various genes have been discovered for biotic and abiotic stress tolerance. The genes discovered for biotic stress are aryloxyalkanoate, dioxygenase, enzymes (aad-1), nitrilase, Cry1Ac, Cry2AB, GTgene, AFP (anti-freezing protein gene) gene, Chitinase II and III gene, and Rps1-k. The genes discovered for abiotic stress are SgNCED1, SgNCED1, USP2, HSP70, BADH, and ALO, PVNCED1, HVA1, LeNCED1. CRISPRs (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) are the short DNA sequences present in bacteria and archaeal genomes which are now currently used by researchers to edit the genome. In different plant species (calli, leaf discs) protoplasts have been successfully used to edit their genome through CRISPR/Cas9 system. The aims of the applications are to increase resistance to abiotic or biotic stress, to engineer metabolic pathways, and to increase grain yield. Incorporation of modern biotechnology, with regular traditional practices in a sustainable way, can fulfill the objective of achieving food security for the present and as well as in future.