Abstract
Abiotic stresses such as high temperature, salinity, and drought adversely affect the survival, growth, and reproduction of plants. Plants respond to such unfavorable changes through developmental, physiological, and biochemical ways, and these responses require expression of stress-responsive genes, which are regulated by a network of transcription factors (TFs), including heat stress transcription factors (HSFs). HSFs play a crucial role in plants response to several abiotic stresses by regulating the expression of stress-responsive genes, such as heat shock proteins (Hsps). In this review, we describe the conserved structure of plant HSFs, the identification of HSF gene families from various plant species, their expression profiling under abiotic stress conditions, regulation at different levels and function in abiotic stresses. Despite plant HSFs share highly conserved structure, their remarkable diversification across plants reflects their numerous functions as well as their integration into the complex stress signaling and response networks, which can be employed in crop improvement strategies via biotechnological intervention.
Highlights
Plants as sessile organisms are routinely confronted by a variety of abiotic or biotic stresses, such as water deficiency, high salt, extreme temperatures, chemical pollutants, oxidative stress, nematodes, herbivores, and pathogens (Al-Whaibi, 2011)
Arabidopsis HSFA3 is regulated by DREB2A as part of drought stress signaling pathway (Scharf et al, 2012), it is tempting to speculate that Arabidopsis HSFA1b and A3 involve in different signal pathways to enhance the tolerance to drought stress
Unlike the above active regulation factors, tomato SlHSFA3 and V. pseudoreticulata VpHSF1 play negative roles in salt and osmotic stress, respectively (Li et al, 2013; Peng et al, 2013). These results suggest that the complex family of plant heat stress transcription factors (HSFs) presents a functional diversity under different abiotic stress conditions
Summary
Plants as sessile organisms are routinely confronted by a variety of abiotic or biotic stresses, such as water deficiency, high salt, extreme temperatures, chemical pollutants, oxidative stress, nematodes, herbivores, and pathogens (Al-Whaibi, 2011). Unlike Arabidopsis AtHSFA1d and A1e, AtHSFB1 and B2b are transcriptional repressors and negatively regulate the expression of HS-inducible HSFs including AtHSFA2 and A7a and themselves (Ikeda et al, 2011).
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