Polyamines Contribution to the Improvement of Crop Plants Tolerance to Abiotic Stress

ANA BERNARDINA MENÉNDEZ; ANDRÉS ALBERTO RODRÍGUEZ; SANTIAGO JAVIER MAIALE; MARGARITA RODRÍGUEZ-KESSLER ; JUAN JIMÉNEZ-BREMONT ; OSCAR ADOLFO RUIZ

Crop Improvement Under Adverse Conditions

Springer

Año: 2013; p. 113 - 136

Multiple biotic and abiotic environmental factors may constitute stresses that affect plant growth and yield in crop species. Among all, abiotic stresses are the main factors negatively affecting crop growth and productivity worldwide. Among abiotic stress factors, temperature extremes (freezing, cold and heat), water availability (drought and ion excess) and ion toxicity (salinity and heavy metals), have been difficult to dissect because defense responses to abiotic factors require regulatory changes to the activation of multiple genes and pathways. However, the advances in physiology, genetics, and molecular biology have greatly improved our understanding of plant responses to stresses but molecular response of plants to abiotic stresses has been often considered as a complex process mainly based on the modulation of transcriptional activity of stress-related genes. Nevertheless, recent findings have suggested new layers of regulation and complexity. Upstream molecular mechanisms are involved in the plant response to abiotic stress, above all in the regulation of timings and amount of specific stress responses. Post-transcriptional mechanisms based on alternative splicing and RNA processing, as well as RNA silencing define the actual transcriptome supporting the stress response. Beyond protein phosphorylation, other post-translational modifications like ubiquitination and sumoylation regulate the activation of pre-existing molecules to ensure a prompt response to stress factors. In this book we planned to address -omics technologies that have emerged during the past decade have been useful in addressing, in an integrated fashion, the multigenicity of the plant abiotic stress response through genome sequences; cell-, organ-, tissue- and stress-specific transcript collections; transcript, protein and metabolite profiles and their dynamic changes; protein interactions; and mutant screens. The chapters in this book deal with the importance of -omics approaches like Genomics, Metabolomics, Transcriptomics and Proteomics in abiotic stress tolerance in crop plants. It is thought that large scale analytical approaches better inform about the structure and complexity of signaling networks, identify subsets of genes/activities that are co-regulated to a given stress factors and reveal unexpected or previously uncharacterized interactions.