Plants are exposed to a range of environmental stresses including heat, cold, drought, salinity, soil compaction, nutrient deficiencies, heavy metals, ozone depletion, UV radiation and other biotic elements.
Stress has a complex response, involving physical, morphological, gene expression and secondary metabolic changes that vary depending on the species, genotype and duration of the event.
What is Abiotic plant stress response?
Abiotic plant stress response is a physiological mechanism that allows plants to adapt and survive under various environmental stresses by developing defense mechanisms. These include upregulation of osmolytes, osmoprotectants, enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants, as well as other defense molecules.
One major signaling pathway involved in the abiotic stress response is calcium sensing. This involves activation of Ca2+-binding proteins and changes to the cytoplasmic Ca2+ concentration. These signals are transduced via membrane receptors such as G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), RLKs, and histidine kinases.
Another crucial signaling pathway involves the soluble ABA receptors. These activate PP2Cs, histidine-phosphorylated proteins that remove a phosphate group from their substrate proteins. This sets up an intricate signaling cascade.
This ABA pathway regulates other proteins like SWI3 and AKT2. Furthermore, it's involved in inducing genes necessary for ionic homeostasis as well as gene-expression reprogramming under stressful conditions (Khan et al., 2019).
Many transcription factors are activated by abiotic stresses such as drought or salt stress. These include CAMTA proteins with conserved motif sequences that recognize calmodulin; ZAT12, a zinc finger protein, is one such example. Other transcription factors activated by these stresses include DREB2 and CBF3 (Vogel et al., 2005). Sumoylation–which involves binding SUMO peptides to DNA sequences–is another crucial step in this pathway.
What to know about Abiotic plant stress response?
Abiotic stress is a complex process that has devastating effects on plant metabolism and productivity. It's caused by environmental elements like temperature and light intensity, as well as the presence or absence of osmotic pressure.
Plant responses to abiotic stresses are complex, involving sensing, signaling and transcription of genes before protein synthesis. By understanding how plants respond to abiotic stresses we can identify new approaches that could reduce climate change's impacts on crop production.
Though much research has been done in this area, much remains uncertain about the molecular mechanisms underlying abiotic stress response. One major challenge lies in identifying sensors and signaling pathways related to abiotic stress as well as downstream effector proteins that regulate physiological outputs (Fujii & Zhu, 2009; Nakashima et al., 2009).
Another challenging aspect is identifying transcription factors responsible for activating abiotic stress responses. One such transcription factor that activates in drought and salinity stress is the CAMTA protein family, which contains a conserved motif linked to Ca2+ signaling activated under these stress conditions.
Why is Abiotic plant stress response important?
Plants have evolved adaptive strategies to combat the negative effects of abiotic stress conditions, leading to improved growth and productivity. These specialized responses involve changes in protein abundance that can be best explored through proteomics analysis.
Understanding the signal pathways responsible for plants' abiotic stress response will enable us to create genetically modified plants with desired resistance traits to meet global food demands and combat climate change. Research on key plant stress signalling pathways has allowed scientists to generate improved drought-tolerant Glycine max (soybean) and Zea mays (corn) plants that have been approved by agriculture industry for use.
Abiotic stress signaling pathways control a multitude of proteins essential for ion and water transport, metabolic reprogramming, and gene expression to maintain homeostasis and cell stability during stressful conditions. These core pathways include SNF1 related protein kinases and AMPK activation.
Phytohormones play a significant role in the regulation of the abiotic stress response. One such example is how ABA and salicylic acid (SA) collaborate to control immunity against pathogens under drought and salt stress conditions in Arabidopsis thaliana.
ABA alters DNA methylation status and encourages ubiquitination, activating transcription factors responsible for abiotic stress responses. This modification allows genes that would not normally be expressed without stressors to express. Furthermore, ABA modifies chromosome organization by relocating moveable DNA elements like transposons.
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