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Perhaps the greatest challenge facing plant biologists this century is developing crop varieties tolerant to drought stress. A warming climate, more extreme weather patterns, and competing demands for limited water supplies will likely combine to increase the frequency and severity of periods of drought, particularly in the Great Plains. Against that backdrop, this volume provides the valuable service of summarizing the state of the art of drought adaptation research involving the world's most important group of crops, the cereals. Editor Jean-Marcel Ribaut of the Generation Challenge Program has enlisted leading authorities on abiotic stress tolerance to author 17 chapters grouped into sections on drought, plant development and environmental interaction, plant improvement in selected cereals, and metabolic and gene expression response to water stress.