Abstract
Global agriculture in the context of growing and expanding populations is under huge pressure to provide increased food, feed, and fiber. The recent phenomenon of climate change has further added fuel to the fire. It has been practically established now that the global temperature has been on the increase with associated fluctuations in annual rainfall regimes, and the resultant drought and flood events and increasing soil and water salinization. These challenges would be met with the introduction and utilization of new technologies coupled with conventional approaches. In recent years, transgenic technology has been proved very effective in terms of production of improved varieties of crop plants, resistant to biotic stresses. The abiotic stresses such as salt and drought are more complex traits, controlled by many genes. Transgenic plant development for these stresses has utilized many single genes. However, much emphasis has been placed on genes catalyzing the biosynthetic pathways of osmoprotectants. This review focuses on the current status of research on osmoprotectant genes and their role in abiotic stress tolerance in transgenic plants.
Highlights
Plant adaptation to abiotic stresses is controlled by cascades of events at the molecular level
Much progress has been made towards engineering transgenic plants with abiotic stress tolerance that utilized genes encoding osmoprotectants, and other stress-related functional proteins
In comparison to other genes, biosynthetic accumulation of glycine betaine, proline and other osmoprotectant genes in several transgenic crop plants have shown some improvement in abiotic stress tolerance
Summary
Plant adaptation to abiotic stresses is controlled by cascades of events at the molecular level. Several gene families are responsible for the induction of stress related defense pathways These genes can be distributed into three groups: the first category contains those involved in the direct protection of important proteins and membranes such as osmoprotectants, free radical scavengers [1], late embryogenesis abundant (LEA) proteins, heat shock proteins and chaperons [2,3,4]. The most important osmoprotectants that are rapidly accumulated in plants subjected to salt stress, include amino acid (e.g. proline), quaternary amines (e.g. glycine betaine and polyamines), and polyol/sugars (e.g. mannitol, trehalose). These compounds help plants re-establish osmotic homeostasis by increasing water potential. The osmoprotectant, proline accumulation has been suggested to have a ROS scavenging activity in plants during exposure to salt stress
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