Higher plants not only provide human beings renewable food, building materials and energy, but also play the most important role in keeping a stable environment on earth. Plants differ from animals in many aspects, but the important is that plants are more easily influenced by environment than animals. Plants have a series of fine mechanisms for responding to environmental changes, which has been established during their long-period evolution and artificial domestication. The machinery related to molecular biology is the most important basis. The elucidation of it will extremely and purposefully promote the sustainable utilization of plant resources and make the best use of its current potential under different scales. This molecular mechanism at least includes drought signal recognition (input), signal transduction (many cascade biochemical reactions are involved in this process), signal output, signal responses and phenotype realization, which is a multi-dimension network system and contains many levels of gene expression and regulation. We will focus on the physiological and molecular adaptive machinery of plants under soil water stress and draw a possible blueprint for it. Meanwhile, the issues and perspectives are also discussed. We conclude that biological measures is the basic solution to solving various types of issues in relation to sustainable development and the plant measures is the eventual way.

Maize cultivar zhengdan958 was selected as materials. The sub-cellular distribution of soluble calcium at different phases was shown by the potassium-pyroantinonate-precipitation method and transmission electron microscopy. The results showed that the deposits of calcium antimonate as the indicator for Ca 2+ localization were mainly concentrated within the vacuoles and intercellular spaces without PEG treatment. Firstly, when the leaf was treated with PEG, the Ca 2+ level increased remarkably in the cytoplasm, but considerably decreased in vacuoles and intercellular gaps. Meanwhile, the level of Ca 2+ also increased in chloroplast and nucleus. When the treatment continued, the level of Ca 2+ in chloroplasts and nucleus continued to increase and some cells and chloroplasts finally disintegrated, showing that there is a relationship between the distribution of Ca 2+ and the super-microstructure of cells. Ca 2+ plays a role in the plant drought resistance. The changes of cytosolic Ca 2+ localization in cells treated by ABA, EGTA, Verapamil and TFP were investigated too. The increase of cytosolic calcium induced by ABA was mainly caused by calcium influx. Calmodulin participated in ABA signal transduction, which was indicated by the variation of cytosolic Ca 2+ /CaM concentration change induced by ABA. The above results provided a direct evidence for calcium ion as an important signal at the experimental cellular level.

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