Engineering Phytohormones for Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Crop Plants

Abstract

Abiotic stresses including salinity, drought, extreme temperatures, and heavy metals are posing serious threats to agricultural yields as well as the quality of produce. This necessitates the production of cultivars capable to withstand the harsh environmental conditions without substantial yield losses. Owing to the complexity underlying stress tolerance traits, conventional breeding techniques have met with limited success and demand effective supplements to feed the growing food demands worldwide. This necessitates the development and deployment of novel and potent approaches, and engineering of phytohormone metabolism could be a method of choice to produce climate resilient crops with higher yields. Phytohormones are considered critical for regulating and coordinating plant growth and development; however, in recent years, they have received great attention for their multifunctional roles in plant responses to environmental stimuli. Creditable research has shown that phytohormones including the classical ones -auxins, cytokinins, ethylene, gibberellins, and newer members including brassinosteroids, jasmonates, and strigolactones -may prove to be potent targets for their metabolic engineering for producing abiotic stress-tolerant crop plants. This chapter presents short description of the roles of phytohormones in abiotic stress responses and tolerance followed by reviewing attempts made by the plant biotechnologists for

From plant survival to thriving: exploring the miracle of brassinosteroids for boosting abiotic stress resilience in horticultural crops

“…Despite the fact that there are not as many of these reports, a thorough review of them has been done and is reviewed here (Khan et al, 2020). BRs control the regulation of photosynthesis, root extension, stomatal growth, leaf senescence, chlorophyll breakdown, and nutritional balance (Daszkowska-Golec, 2011;Kumar et al, 2016). It is well known that BRs play a critical role in how effectively plants can withstand stress and acclimatize to it.…”

Genomic, Molecular Evolution, and Expression Analysis of Genes Encoding Putative Classical AGPs, Lysine-Rich AGPs, and AG Peptides in Brassica rapa

“…Phytohormones serve as key signals for the plants to respond to environmental stimuli (Wania et al, 2016). In order to investigate whether BrAGPs were involved in phytohormone responses, we chose 15 classical AGPs, 13 AG peptides and two lys-rich AGPs, which according to our qRT-PCR displayed expression in the leaf.…”

“…Changes in the expression of each BrAGP gene by exogenous ABA treatment indicates that the AGPs may participate in the signaling cascade by the dynamic release and uptake of glycosyl radicals. It was clear that there is complex cross-talk among plant hormones, which are important in plant growth regulation and defense responses (Kohli et al, 2013; Wania et al, 2016). In this study, we have shown that there is a large overlap of the BrAGPs induced or suppressed by ABA, GA, and MeJA treatments.…”

Influence of Exogenous 28-Homobrassinolide Optimized Dosage and EDAH Application on Hormone Status, Grain Filling, and Maize Production

“…Plant endogenous hormones govern these changes, such as the cell membrane composition and morpho-physiological modification [28]. BRs are directly and indirectly involved in resistance against abiotic stress by inducing different molecular changes such as higher photosynthetic efficiency [29,30], the overexpression and maintenance of stress-responsive genes [31,32], osmoprotectant accumulation, and antioxidant enzyme induction [33,34]. Furthermore, phytohormones combat the stress against heavy metals such as soil acidity [35], heat stress [36], and drought stress [28], by inducing different stress-responsive genes.…”