Abiotic Stress Responses in Plants: Potential Targets on Studying Heavy Metal Stress tolerance in Bryophytes

Abstract

Pollution of the biosphere with heavy metals has phenomenally increased since the commencement of industrial revolution. It poses several environment and health concerns. High regeneration and metal accumulation capacity the possibility of genetic transformation by homologous recombination extend the candidature of bryophytes as promising experimental models for heavy metal stress tolerance studies. Plants use several abiotic stress pathways which share common elements that are potential “nodes” for cross talks. Common elements/ molecules, which are likely to occur early in several stress response cascades in bryophytes seem to be the potential targets for heavy metal tolerance studies that can be worked out in future, at biochemical, protein and gene level.