Molecular Cues of Phytohormone-Mediated Modulation of Plant Abiotic Stress Responses
摘要
Plants are sessile organisms and are often challenged with multitude of stress conditions, of both natural and anthropogenic origin. Abiotic stress conditions such as drought, extreme temperature regimes, and salinity pose a serious threat to crop production and are the primary cause of crop loss and reduction in yield across the globe. Phytohormones are key players involved in various stages of plant growth and development and also confer tolerance to a wide array of abiotic stressors. Therefore, understanding the molecular networks in conjunction with phytohormones would offer great advantages toward divulging the complex signaling networks that underlie improvement and development of stress-resilient crop plants. Further, cross-talks between different plant hormones plays critical roles and helps plants to respond to abiotic stress. The elucidation of molecular mechanisms that regulate plant hormone biosynthesis, signaling, and functions is crucial for fine-tuning the regulation of the hormonal biosynthesis pathways and for the generation of genetically modified crop plants with improved stress tolerance responses toward multiple abiotic stress conditions. Advances in genomics-accelerated breeding and gene editing techniques offer promise to speed up improvement of traits of stress tolerance. In this chapter, we have summarized different abiotic stress factors that severely affect growth and development of plants and involvement of different class of phytohormones that play imperative roles in delivering tolerance responses to counteract abiotic stress conditions.