Drought alone and with associated abiotic stress such as heat and
nutrient deficiency leads to significant agricultural crop loss. Thus,
with changing climatic conditions, it is important to develop resilience
measures in agricultural systems against drought stress. In this review,
we discuss the modifications in plants while responding to drought
giving special focus on roots as they are the primary sense organs in
this context. Prospects of genomic crop improvement by pointing out the
focus areas to engineer root system architecture and genomic regions
involved in the related traits are also discussed. We have also listed
instruments and software facilitating high throughput phenotyping of
root system in field conditions as the phenotyping of root system
architecture in the field is a challenge.