Designing climate-smart future crops employing signal transduction components

Abstract

The explosive increase in world population, along with increasing environmental stresses like salinity, drought, and high and low temperatures, has created two major problems: more mouths to feed and less land to farm. Stress perception and thereafter the transduction of the stress signal are the initial steps of a typical stress response of plants. Therefore, understanding the mechanism(s) of plant stress perception and signal transduction is an imperative for designing climate-smart future crops. Recent studies have shown that abiotic stress signaling in plants comprises many components, for instance, receptor-coupled phosphorelay, phosphoinositol-induced Ca 2+ changes, mitogen-activated protein kinase cascades, and transcriptional activation of stress-responsive genes. In addition, adapter or scaffold- mediated protein–protein interactions and protein post–translational modifi cations play a major role in abiotic stress signal transduction. An improved understanding of the mechanistic details of abiotic stress–associated signaling in plants combined with functional genomics may aid in pushing the productivity of crop plants closer to the optimum theoretical levels via genetic engineering or breeding approaches. In the present chapter, we discuss the recent progress related to the development of crop plants with enhanced stress tolerance by manipulating various components of the plant signal transduction machinery.