Environmental Stress and Plants

Abstract

Land plants are constantly subjected to multiple unfavorable or even adverse environmental conditions. Among them, abiotic stresses (such as salt, drought, heat, cold, heavy metals, ozone, UV radiation, and nutrient deficiencies) have detrimental effects on plant growth and productivity and are increasingly important considering the direct or indirect effects of climate change. Plants respond in many ways to abiotic stresses, from gene expression to physiology, from plant architecture to primary, and secondary metabolism. These complex changes allow plants to tolerate and/or adapt to adverse conditions. The complexity of plant response can be further influenced by the duration and intensity of stress, the plant genotype, the combination of different stresses, the exposed tissue and cell type, and the developmental stage at which plants perceive the stress. It is therefore important to understand more about how plants perceive stress conditions and how they respond and adapt (both in natural and anthropogenic environments). These concepts were the basis of the Special Issue that International Journal of Molecular Sciences expressly addressed to the relationship between environmental stresses and plants and that resulted in the publication of 5 reviews and 38 original research articles. The large participation of several authors and the good number of contributions testifies to the considerable interest that the topic currently receives in the plant science community, especially in the light of the foreseeable climate changes. Here, we briefly summarize the contributions included in the Special Issue, both original articles categorized by stress type and reviews that discuss more comprehensive responses to various stresses.

Transcriptome profiling disclosed the effect of single and combined drought and heat stress on reprogramming of genes expression in barley flag leaf

“…Response of plants to constrained conditions is a very complex phenomenon and involves reactions of a multitude of mechanisms. To date, many studies have focused on plants’ molecular adaptation to environmental stresses, and numerous stress-induced genes have been reported, also in barley ( Gürel et al., 2016 ; Zhao et al., 2020 ; Mareri et al., 2022 ). This includes the examination of the protective role of late embryogenesis-related proteins (LEA) during dehydration, and dehydrins belonging to group 2 of LEA are the most commonly studied in various plant species ( Yu et al., 2018 ).…”

Pseudomonas cannabina pv. alisalensis Virulence Factors Are Involved in Resistance to Plant-Derived Antimicrobials during Infection

“…Bacteria are exposed to, and tolerate, diverse and potentially toxic compounds in the natural environment [40]. While efflux transporters are generally thought to involve bacterial antibiotic resistance in vitro, their contributions to plant bacterial virulence have so far been poorly understood.…”

Integrated Transcriptome and Targeted Metabolite Analysis Reveal miRNA-mRNA Networks in Low-Light-Induced Lotus Flower Bud Abortion

“…MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are noncoding 21–22 nucleotide (nt) RNAs [ 12 , 13 ]. At present, a handful of miRNAs and their target genes have been found to be implicated in diverse stages of plant flowering [ 14 , 15 ]. As one of the highly conserved miRNAs, miR156, along with its target gene, the SQUAMOSA-promoter binding-like (SPL) gene family, plays an important role in plant growth and development [ 16 , 17 ], metabolic regulation [ 18 ], and abiotic stress responses [ 19 ].…”