Inducing drought tolerance in plants: Recent advances
TL;DR: Rapid advance in knowledge on genomics and proteomics will certainly be beneficial to fine-tune the molecular breeding and transformation approaches so as to achieve a significant progress in crop improvement in future.
About: This article is published in Biotechnology Advances.The article was published on 2010-01-01. It has received 715 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Drought tolerance & Molecular breeding.
Citations
More filters
Journal Article•
TL;DR: For the next few weeks the course is going to be exploring a field that’s actually older than classical population genetics, although the approach it’ll be taking to it involves the use of population genetic machinery.
Abstract: So far in this course we have dealt entirely with the evolution of characters that are controlled by simple Mendelian inheritance at a single locus. There are notes on the course website about gametic disequilibrium and how allele frequencies change at two loci simultaneously, but we didn’t discuss them. In every example we’ve considered we’ve imagined that we could understand something about evolution by examining the evolution of a single gene. That’s the domain of classical population genetics. For the next few weeks we’re going to be exploring a field that’s actually older than classical population genetics, although the approach we’ll be taking to it involves the use of population genetic machinery. If you know a little about the history of evolutionary biology, you may know that after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900 there was a heated debate between the “biometricians” (e.g., Galton and Pearson) and the “Mendelians” (e.g., de Vries, Correns, Bateson, and Morgan). Biometricians asserted that the really important variation in evolution didn’t follow Mendelian rules. Height, weight, skin color, and similar traits seemed to
9,847 citations
Huazhong Agricultural University1, University of Queensland2, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad3, Beijing Normal University4, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology5, Northeast Agricultural University6, Wellington Management Company7, Islamia University8, King Abdulaziz University9, Linyi University10, Yangtze University11
TL;DR: A comprehensive account of conventional as well as modern approaches to deal with heat and drought stresses have been presented here and a side-by-side critical discussion on salient responses and management strategies for these two important abiotic stresses provides a unique insight into the phenomena.
Abstract: Abiotic stresses are one of the major constraints to crop production and food security worldwide. The situation has aggravated due to the drastic and rapid changes in global climate. Heat and drought stress are undoubtedly the two most important stresses having huge impact on growth and productivity of the crops. It is very important to understand the physiological, biochemical and ecological interventions related to these stresses for better management. A wide range of plant responses to these stresses could be generalized into morphological, physiological and biochemical responses. Interestingly, this review provides a detailed account of plant responses to heat and drought stresses with special focus on highlighting the commonalities and differences. Crop growth and yields are negatively affected by sub-optimal water supply and abnormal temperatures due to physical damages, physiological disruptions and biochemical changes. Both these stresses have multi-lateral impacts and therefore, complex in mechanistic action. A better understanding of plant responses to these stresses has pragmatic implication for remedies and management. A comprehensive account of conventional as well as modern approaches to deal with heat and drought stresses have also been presented here. A side-by-side critical discussion on salient responses and management strategies for these two important abiotic stresses provides a unique insight into the phenomena. A holistic approach taking into account the different management options to deal with heat and drought stress simultaneously could be a win-win approach in future.
1,354 citations
Cites background from "Inducing drought tolerance in plant..."
...The drought tolerance capacity of transgenic crops depends on the crop growth stage and intensity of stress (Reddy et al., 2004; Ashraf, 2010)....
[...]
...the drought tolerant cultivars of major cereals and leguminous crops (Ashraf, 2010)....
[...]
...Transgenic approaches involve modifications in the qualitative as well as the quantitative traits through transfer of desired genes (Ashraf, 2010)....
[...]
...Plant breeding using typical old techniques has proved very handy for the identification of stress-tolerant genetic traits in various crops and cultivars and the transfer of those traits into the cultivars having good agronomic performance (Ashraf, 2010)....
[...]
...Mapping of the QTLs for the traits related to drought tolerance has been done in variety of crop species as enlisted in earlier reviews (Ashraf, 2010; Farooq et al., 2014; Lata et al., 2015)....
[...]
TL;DR: With increasing knowledge to comprehensively decipher the complicated mechanisms of drought resistance in model plants, it still remains an enormous challenge to develop water-saving and drought-resistant crops to cope with the water shortage and increasing demand for food production in the future.
Abstract: Plants often encounter unfavorable environmental conditions because of their sessile lifestyle These adverse factors greatly affect the geographic distribution of plants, as well as their growth and productivity Drought stress is one of the premier limitations to global agricultural production due to the complexity of the water-limiting environment and changing climate Plants have evolved a series of mechanisms at the morphological, physiological, biochemical, cellular, and molecular levels to overcome water deficit or drought stress conditions The drought resistance of plants can be divided into four basic types-drought avoidance, drought tolerance, drought escape, and drought recovery Various drought-related traits, including root traits, leaf traits, osmotic adjustment capabilities, water potential, ABA content, and stability of the cell membrane, have been used as indicators to evaluate the drought resistance of plants In the last decade, scientists have investigated the genetic and molecular mechanisms of drought resistance to enhance the drought resistance of various crops, and significant progress has been made with regard to drought avoidance and drought tolerance With increasing knowledge to comprehensively decipher the complicated mechanisms of drought resistance in model plants, it still remains an enormous challenge to develop water-saving and drought-resistant crops to cope with the water shortage and increasing demand for food production in the future
728 citations
Cites background from "Inducing drought tolerance in plant..."
...Genetic transformation or engineering provides an alternative or complementary approach for developing desired traits more efficiently [224]....
[...]
...Conventional drought resistance breeding largely depends on genetic variation of the DR-related traits in a specific species, and it is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process [223, 224]....
[...]
TL;DR: Understanding the overall control of Na+ accumulation and functional studies of genes involved in transport processes, will provide a new opportunity to improve the salinity tolerance of plants relevant to food security in arid regions.
Abstract: Soil salinization is a major threat to agriculture in arid and semi-arid regions, where water scarcity and inadequate drainage of irrigated lands severely reduce crop yield. Salt accumulation inhibits plant growth and reduces the ability to uptake water and nutrients, leading to osmotic or water-deficit stress. Salt is also causing injury of the young photosynthetic leaves and acceleration of their senescence, as the Na+ cation is toxic when accumulating in cell cytosol resulting in ionic imbalance and toxicity of transpiring leaves. To cope with salt stress, plants have evolved mainly two types of tolerance mechanisms based on either limiting the entry of salt by the roots, or controlling its concentration and distribution. Understanding the overall control of Na+ accumulation and functional studies of genes involved in transport processes, will provide a new opportunity to improve the salinity tolerance of plants relevant to food security in arid regions. A better understanding of these tolerance mechanisms can be used to breed crops with improved yield performance under salinity stress. Moreover, associations of cultures with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi could serve as an alternative and sustainable strategy to increase crop yields in salt affected fields.
499 citations
Cites background from "Inducing drought tolerance in plant..."
...Salt stress tolerance level varies from one species to another and, for cereal crops, bread wheat is a moderately salt-tolerant crop (Maas and Hoffman, 1977)....
[...]
...Conventional plant breeding approaches through which beneficial traits can be introgressed into elite varieties have been adopted since a long time to generate stress tolerant varieties (for review, see Ashraf, 2010; Varshney et al., 2011)....
[...]
TL;DR: The data demonstrate that Cd perturbs the DNA methylation status through the involvement of a specific methyltransferase, linked to nuclear chromatin reconfiguration likely to establish a new balance of expressed/repressed chromatin.
Abstract: In mammals, cadmium is widely considered as a non-genotoxic carcinogen acting through a methylation-dependent epigenetic mechanism. Here, the effects of Cd treatment on the DNA methylation patten are examined together with its effect on chromatin reconfiguration in Posidonia oceanica. DNA methylation level and pattern were analysed in actively growing organs, under short- (6 h) and long- (2 d or 4 d) term and low (10 mM) and high (50 mM) doses of Cd, through a Methylation-Sensitive Amplification Polymorphism technique and an immunocytological approach, respectively. The expression of one member of the CHROMOMETHYLASE (CMT) family, a DNA methyltransferase, was also assessed by qRT-PCR. Nuclear chromatin ultrastructure was investigated by transmission electron microscopy. Cd treatment induced a DNA hypermethylation, as well as an up-regulation of CMT, indicating that de novo methylation did indeed occur. Moreover, a high dose of Cd led to a progressive heterochromatinization of interphase nuclei and apoptotic figures were also observed after long-term treatment. The data demonstrate that Cd perturbs the DNA methylation status through the involvement of a specific methyltransferase. Such changes are linked to nuclear chromatin reconfiguration likely to establish a new balance of expressed/repressed chromatin. Overall, the data show an epigenetic basis to the mechanism underlying Cd toxicity in plants.
450 citations
Cites background from "Inducing drought tolerance in plant..."
...(i) Modifications to decrease cell osmotic potential (π) and thus increase turgor whilst decreasing plant water potential (ψP), although later the mechanisms actually affected may change [e.g. detoxification of reactive oxygen species (ROS)]. Mannitol: Karakas et al. (1997), Abebe et al....
[...]
..., 2007; Thomson, 2008) such as quantitative trait loci and markers (Kamoshita et al., 2008; Ashraf, 2010; Fleury et al., 2010; Richards et al., 2010)....
[...]
References
More filters
Book•
01 Jan 1981
TL;DR: The genetic constitution of a population: Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and changes in gene frequency: migration mutation, changes of variance, and heritability are studied.
Abstract: Part 1 Genetic constitution of a population: Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Part 2 Changes in gene frequency: migration mutation. Part 3 Small populations - changes in gene frequency under simplified conditions. Part 4 Small populations - less simplified conditions. Part 5 Small populations - pedigreed populations and close inbreeding. Part 6 Continuous variation. Part 7 Values and means. Part 8 Variance. Part 9 Resemblance between relatives. Part 10 Heritability. Part 11 Selection - the response and its prediction. Part 12 Selection - the results of experiments. Part 13 Selection - information from relatives. Part 14 Inbreeding and crossbreeding - changes of mean value. Part 15 Inbreeding and crossbreeding - changes of variance. Part 16 Inbreeding and crossbreeding - applications. Part 17 Scale. Part 18 Threshold characters. Part 19 Correlated characters. Part 20 Metric characters under natural selection.
20,288 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: For the next few weeks the course is going to be exploring a field that’s actually older than classical population genetics, although the approach it’ll be taking to it involves the use of population genetic machinery.
Abstract: So far in this course we have dealt entirely with the evolution of characters that are controlled by simple Mendelian inheritance at a single locus. There are notes on the course website about gametic disequilibrium and how allele frequencies change at two loci simultaneously, but we didn’t discuss them. In every example we’ve considered we’ve imagined that we could understand something about evolution by examining the evolution of a single gene. That’s the domain of classical population genetics. For the next few weeks we’re going to be exploring a field that’s actually older than classical population genetics, although the approach we’ll be taking to it involves the use of population genetic machinery. If you know a little about the history of evolutionary biology, you may know that after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900 there was a heated debate between the “biometricians” (e.g., Galton and Pearson) and the “Mendelians” (e.g., de Vries, Correns, Bateson, and Morgan). Biometricians asserted that the really important variation in evolution didn’t follow Mendelian rules. Height, weight, skin color, and similar traits seemed to
9,847 citations
"Inducing drought tolerance in plant..." refers background in this paper
...Considerable improvement in a trait can bemade, if the genetic variance among the genotypes of a crop, selection intensity, and heritability are reasonably high (Falconer, 1989)....
[...]
TL;DR: In this review article, numerous examples of successful application of these compounds to improve plant stress tolerance are presented and a better understanding of the mechanisms of action of exogenously applied GB and proline is expected to aid their effective utilization in crop production in stress environments.
3,847 citations
"Inducing drought tolerance in plant..." refers background in this paper
...For example, among the many organic osmolytes known to play a substantial role in stress tolerance, glycine betaine (GB), a quaternary ammonium compound, occurs richly in response to dehydration stress (Mansour, 2000; Mohanty et al., 2002; Yang et al., 2003; Ashraf and Foolad, 2007)....
[...]
...It is now well established that compatible organic solutes play a central role in plant drought tolerance (Ashraf and Foolad, 2007)....
[...]
TL;DR: Overexpression of the DREB1A cDNA in transgenic Arabidopsis plants not only induced strong expression of the target genes under unstressed conditions but also caused dwarfed phenotypes in the transgenic plants, and revealed freezing and dehydration tolerance.
Abstract: Plant growth is greatly affected by drought and low temperature. Expression of a number of genes is induced by both drought and low temperature, although these stresses are quite different. Previous experiments have established that a cis-acting element named DRE (for dehydration-responsive element) plays an important role in both dehydration- and low-temperature-induced gene expression in Arabidopsis. Two cDNA clones that encode DRE binding proteins, DREB1A and DREB2A, were isolated by using the yeast one-hybrid screening technique. The two cDNA libraries were prepared from dehydrated and cold-treated rosette plants, respectively. The deduced amino acid sequences of DREB1A and DREB2A showed no significant sequence similarity, except in the conserved DNA binding domains found in the EREBP and APETALA2 proteins that function in ethylene-responsive expression and floral morphogenesis, respectively. Both the DREB1A and DREB2A proteins specifically bound to the DRE sequence in vitro and activated the transcription of the b-glucuronidase reporter gene driven by the DRE sequence in Arabidopsis leaf protoplasts. Expression of the DREB1A gene and its two homologs was induced by low-temperature stress, whereas expression of the DREB2A gene and its single homolog was induced by dehydration. Overexpression of the DREB1A cDNA in transgenic Arabidopsis plants not only induced strong expression of the target genes under unstressed conditions but also caused dwarfed phenotypes in the transgenic plants. These transgenic plants also revealed freezing and dehydration tolerance. In contrast, overexpression of the DREB2A cDNA induced weak expression of the target genes under unstressed conditions and caused growth retardation of the transgenic plants. These results indicate that two independent families of DREB proteins, DREB1 and DREB2, function as trans-acting factors in two separate signal transduction pathways under low-temperature and dehydration conditions, respectively.
2,886 citations
"Inducing drought tolerance in plant..." refers background in this paper
...transgenic plants Liu et al. (2009)...
[...]
...transgenic plants as compared to wild type Liu et al. (2008)...
[...]
...…2009), dehydration-responsive element-binding factors (DREB) have attracted the attention of many scientists since Jaglo-Ottosen et al. (1998) and Liu et al. (1998) first reported the up-regulation of many genes in DREB1/CBF transgenic Arabidopsis involved in tolerance to a variety of stresses…...
[...]
TL;DR: The responses of plants to salt and water stress are described, the regulatory circuits which allow plants to cope with stress are presented, and how the present knowledge can be applied to obtain tolerant plants is discussed.
Abstract: Agricultural productivity worldwide is subject to increasing environmental constraints, particularly to drought and salinity due to their high magnitude of impact and wide distribution. Traditional breeding programs trying to improve abiotic stress tolerance have had some success, but are limited by the multigenic nature of the trait. Tolerant plants such as Craterostigma plantagenium, Mesembryanthemum crystallinum, Thellungiella halophila and other hardy plants could be valuable tools to dissect the extreme tolerance nature. In the last decade, Arabidopsis thaliana, a genetic model plant, has been extensively used for unravelling the molecular basis of stress tolerance. Arabidopsis also proved to be extremely important for assessing functions for individual stress-associated genes due to the availability of knock-out mutants and its amenability for genetic transformation. In this review, the responses of plants to salt and water stress are described, the regulatory circuits which allow plants to cope wit...
2,351 citations
"Inducing drought tolerance in plant..." refers background in this paper
...However, several transcription factors have been identified, which are involved in gene regulation in plants under water limited conditions (Bartels and Sunkar, 2005; Vinocur and Altman, 2005)....
[...]