Climate Change and Plant Abiotic Stress Tolerance

Plants escape drought by fast phenological development, completing their life cycle before the water deficit occurs and it is distinct from drought resistance. Drought tolerance involves biochemical mechanisms activated after stress to enable plant to maintain functional growth under low available water.

Osmotic adjustment is a typical physiological mechanism for dehydration tolerance or turgor maintenance by accumulation of osmoprotectants, ABA or increase of antioxidative and other protecting mechanism. Usually, plants combined different drought responses, and their adaptation and productivity depend on balance between all three strategies. Drought tolerance is a quantitative, complex trait, under genetic control and significant influence of the environment.

Recent achievements in biotechnology have significantly increased possibilities for gene discovery and functional genomics. Comprehension of gene action is a major challenge in postgenomic era, since many of the roles of particular genes are unknown, they are inferred and associated with other known genes, and that provide a better understanding of biological functioning.

The combination of data on gene expression, protein synthesis, and production of small cell metabolites give better overview of plant response to drought-stressed environment. System biology examines all factors in plants in response to environmental stresses that help in better explanation and understanding of involved mechanism.

As climate change includes crop adaptation to new environmental conditions, breeders are challenged to breed for new unpredictable conditions, and to consider the genetic potential of past breeding work. Global warming indicates necessity to look for crops that are more convenient for new environment, not only to focus on adapted crops and attempt to improve their tolerance to drought, cold, heat, or any other emerged conditions.

Progress in breeding for improved drought tolerance will be accomplished by integration of conventional breeding with physiology and genomics [ 8 ]. Developing tools integrating environmental stressors and diverse genetic backgrounds, together with numerous levels of analysis will help in better understanding of biological processes in plants under stress. Although new technics can be used to predict some aspect of plant responses to stress, there is still a large gap between huge amount of available data and our understanding of biological networks and phenomena.

It required having close collaboration of agronomists, molecular biologists, biochemists, and computer scientists in order to provide those answers [ 9 ]. Embed this code snippet in the HTML of your website to show this chapter.

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Help us write another book on this subject and reach those readers. Login to your personal dashboard for more detailed statistics on your publications. Climate change is a serious problem influencing agricultural production worldwide and challenging researchers to investigate plant responses and to breed crops for the changed growing conditions.

Abiotic stresses are the most important for crop production, affecting about These stress factors include high and low temperature, water deficit drought and flooding, sa These stress factors include high and low temperature, water deficit drought and flooding, salinity, heavy metals, UV radiation, light, chemical pollutants, and so on.

Since some of the stresses occurred simultaneously, such as heat and water deficit, causing the interactions of physiological processes, novel multidisciplinary solutions are needed.

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This book provides an overview of the present state in the research of abiotic stresses and molecular, biochemical, and whole plant responses, helping to prevent the negative impact of global climate change. This is made possible by the EU reverse charge method. Edited by Sven Bode Andersen. Edited by Irineo Torres-Pacheco. Edited by Manish Kumar.

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Edited by Wengui Yan. Beyond model plants and reference genotypes, the challenge is to identify how signaling pathways have evolved within a species to program a suite of responses differing in signals and regulatory networks, and constitute genotypes that are adapted to specific stressful environments.

Many studies have begun to deal with the comparison of a few genotypes, such as tolerant and sensitive within a species, for the analysis of differential responses to a defined stress. Since these responses can be due to differences in sets of genes, an understanding of the diversity in signaling pathways can come only by making a systems level study of the differences between genotypes.

Such comparative studies offer a challenge for the integration of diverse functional genomics datasets of gene expression, metabolomics, and stress physiological responses to make comparisons in the network of responses across genotypes. A compatible environment for one plant genotype may not be for another, and all external factors abiotic or biotic, can raise a challenge or stress to the plant depending on the plants genetic constitution and adaptive response.

Molecular genetic analysis of specific genes conferring stress tolerance from tolerant crop accessions have resulted in the map-based isolation of genes for submergence tolerance Xu et al. The variation within the maize drought tolerance gene is particularly interesting because the drought sensitive allele contains a transposon insert in the promoter that is involved in epigenetic regulation of the gene that differs in distribution between temperate and tropical maize. The intriguing challenge ahead is to now see how far McClintock's controlling elements McClintock, , that are induced to move under stress can help plants survive abiotic stresses by creating and regulating networks of genes for stress protection.

The new challenges will come from genome-wide analyses of stress tolerant genotypes from multiple plant species that will probably reveal novel tolerance and selective mechanisms in natural populations.

The supporting technologies from next-generation sequencing to GWAS are available in many plant species, and much research is concentrated in this area for stress tolerance. This is therefore an area for future discoveries that will reveal the evolution of diverse mechanisms for stress tolerance that could be valuable for the design of crop improvement strategies including for climate change challenges. A fruitful strategy for the identification of stress tolerance genes has been by reverse genetics analyses of candidate genes identified through gene expression studies and other bioinformatics methods.

Overexpression studies with transcription factors and other regulatory genes have been popular in transgenic crops, with the objective of improving their stress tolerance and productivity Mickelbart et al. The potential redundancy of stress tolerance genes remains a challenge, since overexpression studies might not represent the natural function of genes in the plant. Nevertheless, all studies testing the potential phenotype of genes for alterations in stress response provide useful information on the gene function as well as the applications.

Gene expression analysis of plants in response to abiotic stresses reveals a large fraction of the genome can be perturbed, reflecting the plasticity in stress response and protection. The complexity of a plants' response to abiotic stress factors, in interaction with its genetic constitution, provides a multitude of morpho-physiological, biochemical, gene expression, and other molecular responses that can best be described by networks of response pathways leading to expression of tolerance and adaptation to the environment. The role of genetics and evolution propounded by Darwinism seemed to prevail over the opposing views of Lamarckism, proposing life forms could acquire information from their environment and pass it on in their genes.

Now, two centuries later the evidence from epigenetics is showing us in surprising detail, with the sophistication of genomics technologies, how the epigenome carries information that is not encoded in the DNA to offspring, and can even provide a mechanism for acclimation and adaptation to stress Avramova, The role of the environment, and subsequently stresses that might permanently plague plants, probably have a significant epigenetic influence on the behavior of plants and their progeny, and provide new challenges to re-visit plant—environment interactions. Abiotic stresses will remain a challenge to the natural environment and agriculture.

The early evolution of land plants took place under dry conditions with extremes of temperature and harsh sunlight, while crop domestication occurred later in more favorable environments.

Subsequently, the selection of plants for productivity traits did not always result in crops that are productive under random stress factors, although the natural variation of crops are genetic reservoirs for abiotic stress adaptation.