Abstract
Plants, as sessile organisms, have limited means to cope with environmental changes. Consequently, they have developed complex regulatory systems to ameliorate abiotic stresses im-posed by environmental changes. One such system is the ubiquitin proteasome pathway, which utilizes E3 ligases to target proteins for proteolytic degradation via the 26S proteasome. Plants ex-press a plethora of E3 ligases that are categorized into four major groups depending on their structure. They are involved in many biological and developmental processes in plants, such as DNA repair, photomorphogenesis, phytohormones signaling, and biotic stress. Moreover, many E3 ligase targets are proteins involved in abiotic stress responses, such as salt, drought, heat, and cold. In this review, we will provide a comprehensive overview of E3 ligases and their substrates that have been connected with abiotic stress in order to illustrate the diversity and complexity of how this pathway enables plant survival under stress conditions.
Highlights
Worldwide agricultural production has been and continues to experience severe yield losses due to exposure to abiotic stress conditions, such as drought, salt, or heat
Abiotic stress is one of the main negative influences that affects the productivity of crops worldwide
Because plants are sessile organisms, they completely depend on fast responsive regulatory mechanisms to withstand stress, which is represented by the ubiquitin proteasome pathway (UPP), and the diversity of E3 ligases and their substrates
Summary
Worldwide agricultural production has been and continues to experience severe yield losses due to exposure to abiotic stress conditions, such as drought, salt, or heat. SCF complexes have been widely described in context with development, light and phytohormone signaling, mitotic processes, and abiotic stress [14,19–28] This wide range of SCF functions is not surprising since some plants can encode for more than 1000 F-box proteins [29,30]. Cullin3-RING E3 ligases (CRL3) use proteins as substrate adaptors that contain a Broad-complex, Tramtrack, and Bric-à-brac/POxvirus and Zinc finger (BTB/POZ) domain [31,32]. Cullin RING E3 ligases (CRL4) use proteins with a modified WD40 domain as substrate adaptors [44], and these adaptors number in the range of 100 in plants [45,46] This class of E3 ligases is known for DNA damage and abiotic stress responses, as well as photomorphogenesis [47–49]. U-box E3s contain a modified RING finger domain that lacks the Zinc binding, but is still able to recruit E2s [53] These E3 ligases function as monomeric E3s and encompass less than 100 members in plants [54–57]. This can lead to the development of novel strategies for bioengineering resilient crop plants, with the aim of securing food production through sustainable agriculture in the upcoming years
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