The Role of Salicylic Acid Signal in Plant Growth, Development and Abiotic Stress

Abstract

In nature, plants are constantly affected by adverse conditions. Unlike animals, plants can resist these adverse stresses only by insisting on their original positions. Stress can be divided into biological stress and abiotic stress, abiotic stress directly affects the growth, development and yield of plants, it spans all developmental stages from seed germination to senescence. In order to adapt to changing environment, plants have evolved well-developed mechanisms that help to perceive the stress signals and enable optimal growth response. Salicylic acid (SA) is an important endogenous signal molecule in plants, which not only regulate some plant growth and development processes, but also plays an important part in plant stress resistance. Much work about salicylic acid has been done on the immunity of plants to pathogens, and the synthesis and signal transduction of SA are clearly under-stood, its function in plant growth, development and abiotic stress is also well learned, we systemically summarized the multiple function of SA signal in non-pathogen-related response, such review should help us understand the common but essential function of SA signal in modulating plant growth, development and abiotic stress.