Understanding molecular mechanism of higher plant plasticity under abiotic stress

The mutual responses of higher plants to environment: Physiological and microbiological aspects

“…From the angle of individual plant development, Plant Growth Grand Periodicity curve can reflect and show the above trend [4-9,102-109,136-140]. Besides, plant responses to soil water deficits take a "slow-fast-slow" shaped curve in terms of main physio-biochemical indices change and this is in agreement with Plant Growth Grand Periodicity, which also illustrates this fact and the wide plasticity for plants [29,31,32,101,102]. Surely, concerted expression of corresponding genes in plant gene regulatory network system makes it possible that we can see the phenotype and phenotype change under given temporal-spatial condition [23,24,82,83,93,95].…”

“…It is important to remember the fact that some transcriptional elements may regulate several metabolic pathways and one metabolic pathway may need orchestrated regulation from some transcriptional elements, which is the nature of plant gene regulatory network system [7,95,96,101,102,125,126]. So, in some cases, only introducing a transcriptional element cannot obtain targeted phenotype and may lead to metabolic unbalance in plants.…”

“…In addition, because of coordinated evolution of transcriptional elements and their regulating metabolic pathways the genetically modifying strategy for the same transcriptional element could produce different phenotypes in different plant species. These issues need deeper exploration to establish an efficient genetically modifying system by transcriptional elements and their network system for improving plant stress resistance and global eco-environment and feeding the world [101,102,120].…”

“…Although it is accepted that diverse environmental stress factors never act alone, experimental study of plant responses to abiotic stresses is normally restricted to plant reactions on isolated stress factors [2][3][4][5][6]134,[144][145][146][147]. However, it has to be considered that stress always occurs as a complex of various interacting environmental factors that contribute in varying degrees to the overall stressed phenotype [72,73,[97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109]. Consequently, plants usually respond to a unique complex of growth conditions [13,16,77,78,117,[124][125][126].…”

Close and distant: Contrasting the metabolism of two closely related subspecies of Scots pine under the effects of folivory and summer drought

“…Additionally, planted ( iberica ) populations of P. sylvestris have declined significantly in southeastern areas of Sierra Nevada where summers are even more extreme than in our study site (Cerrillo, Varo, Lanjeri, & Clemente, 2007; Guada, Camarero, Sánchez‐Salguero, & Cerrillo, 2016), supporting our results. Our metabolomic data thus support our hypothesis that the planted populations of iberica in Sierra Nevada are outside their natural environmental niche, even though iberica and nevadensis belong to the same species, and therefore need to cope with the more extreme summer conditions, forcing trees to produce larger shifts in their metabolomes (Shao et al., 2007). We thus predict that iberica populations will have an uncertain future as warmer and drier conditions in combination with severer defoliation continue to progress poleward.…”