Molecular approaches in deciphering abiotic stress signaling mechanisms in plants

Abstract

There has been considerable interest in the area of abiotic stress research, especially in the direction of producing improved crop varieties that can encounter adversities of abiotic stresses such as heat, cold, drought, osmotic, and salinity effectively. These stresses can act alone or in combination cause greater damage to plants. Thus, in order to combat and survive in these extreme environmental conditions, plants have evolved tolerance mechanisms. These mechanisms include interconnected networks of signaling cascade, which involves role of a large number of genes and their products in tolerance mechanism. The clear-cut understanding of these stress tolerance/resistance mechanisms is critical in order to improve the performance of the plant. Deciphering such complex signaling cascades using traditional genomic approach has been difficult, and therefore, high-throughput functional genomics approaches need to be employed using tools like expression profiling, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics during tolerance response.