Abiotic Stress Responses in Plants: Unraveling the Complexity of Genes and Networks to Survive

Abstract

Plants are often subjected to unfavorable environmental conditions - abiotic factors, causing abiotic stresses - that play a major role in determining productivity of crop yields [1] but also the differential distribution of the plants species across different types of environment [2]. Some examples of abiotic stresses that a plant may face include decreased water availability, extreme temperatures (heating or freezing), decreased availability of soil nutrients and/or excess of toxic ions, excess of light and increased hardness of drying soil that hamper roots growth [3]. The ability of plants to adapt and/or acclimate to different environments is directly or indirectly related with the plasticity and resilience of photosynthesis, in combination with other processes, determining plant growth and development, namely reproduction [4]. A remarkable feature of plant adaptation to abiotic stresses is the activation of multiple responses involving complex gene interactions and crosstalk with many molecular pathways [5, 6]. Abiotic stresses elicit complex cellular responses that have been elucidated by progresses made in exploring and understanding plant abiotic responses at the whole-plant, physiological, biochemical, cellular and molecular levels [7]. One of the biggest challenges to modern sustainable agriculture development is to obtain new knowledge that should allow breeding and engineering plants with new and desired agronomical traits [8]. The creation of stress-tolerant crop either by genetic engineering or through conventional breeding covered almost all aspects of plant science, and is pursued by both public and private sector researchers [9].During the last decade, our research groups have focused their research on elucidating the different components and molecular players underlying abiotic stress responses of a broad range of species both model and crops plant. Several attempts to engineer those species with improved abiotic stress traits (drought and salinity) were made and the response of genetically engineered plants was deeply studied after establishment of adequate physiological methods. Now, we are moving efforts to expand our knowledge on plants response to abiotic stresses using holistic System Biology approaches, taking advantage of available high throughput tools such as transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics.The aim of this chapter is to provide a general overview of the main studies made and how the different expertises of our team were pooled to improve our understanding of the biology of abiotic stress responses in plants. We present some details about the main results and perspectives regarding other possible approaches to develop plants better adapted to face the environmental constraints.