Agricultural productivity is majorly impacted due
to various abiotic stresses, particularly salinity and drought.
Halophytes serve as an excellent resource for identifying and
developing new crop systems, as these grow very luxuriously
in very high saline soils. Understanding salinity stress tolerance
mechanisms in such plants is an important step towards
generating crop varieties that can cope with environmental
stresses. Use of modern tools of ‘omics’ analyses and small
RNA sequencing has helped to gain insights into the complex
plant stress responses. Salinity tolerance being a multigenic
trait requires a combination of strategies and techniques to
successfully develop improved crops varieties. Many transgenic
crops are being developed through genetic transformation.
Besides marker-assisted breeding/QTL approaches are
also being used to improve abiotic stress tolerance. In this
review, we focus on the recent developments in the utilization
of halophytes as a source of genes for genetic improvement in
abiotic stress tolerance of crops.