Elucidating the Response of Crop Plants towards Individual, Combined and Sequentially Occurring Abiotic Stresses

Abstract

In nature, plants are exposed to an ever-changing environment with increasing frequencies of multiple abiotic stresses. These abiotic stresses act either in combination or sequentially, thereby driving vegetation dynamics and limiting plant growth and productivity worldwide. Plants’ responses against these combined and sequential stresses clearly differ from that triggered by an individual stress. Until now, experimental studies were mainly focused on plant responses to individual stress, but have overlooked the complex stress response generated in plants against combined or sequential abiotic stresses, as well as their interaction with each other. However, recent studies have demonstrated that the combined and sequential abiotic stresses overlap with respect to the central nodes of their interacting signaling pathways, and their impact cannot be modelled by swimming in an individual extreme event. Taken together, deciphering the regulatory networks operative between various abiotic stresses in agronomically important crops will contribute towards designing strategies for the development of plants with tolerance to multiple stress combinations. This review provides a brief overview of the recent developments in the interactive effects of combined and sequentially occurring stresses on crop plants. We believe that this study may improve our understanding of the molecular and physiological mechanisms in untangling the combined stress tolerance in plants, and may also provide a promising venue for agronomists, physiologists, as well as molecular biologists.

Characterization of the Wheat Heat Shock Factor TaHsfA2e-5D Conferring Heat and Drought Tolerance in Arabidopsis

“…Environmental stresses, such as high temperatures and drought, adversely affect wheat viability and yield globally, especially during pollination and grain-filling stages. Plants have developed various morphological, physiological, biochemical and molecular alterations, and adaptation strategies to acquire stress tolerance [ 1 , 2 ]. One of the effective strategies is to transcriptionally regulate the expression of stress-related genes, among which transcription factors play a crucial role by activating and/or inhibiting specific genes [ 3 ].…”

Analyzing Modern Biomolecules: The Revolution of Nucleic-Acid Sequencing – Review

“…Genomics-assisted breeding (GAB) allows to improve the germplasm [50]. Besides, multiple stress combinations can be studied [51]. Systems biology strategies are particularly interesting, implementing holistic approaches in these scenarios, integrating different -omics and bioinformatics tools [52].…”

Challenges of Biomass Utilization for Bioenergy in a Climate Change Scenario

“…In the climate change scenario, lignocellulosic biorefinery could be strongly impacted since climate change has been described to affect biomass growth, productivity, chemical composition, and soil microbial community [ 1 , 107 , 108 , 109 , 110 ] ( Figure 5 ). Therefore, since the major feedstocks for lignocellulosic biorefinery are dedicated energy crops (e.g., switchgrass, Miscanthus giganteus , Guinea grass, energy cane, and others), or plant residues (e.g., sugarcane bagasse, corn (maize) stover, wheat straw, and others), climate change and the abiotic stress caused by them might significantly impact the production of cellulosic ethanol and other value-added commodities by reducing the yield and availability of these sources of biomass, along with changes in metabolic pathways.…”

“…Furthermore, recent evidence has shown that combined stresses might affect plant metabolism differently from isolated stress, showing unique responses [ 1 , 110 ]. As climate changes will be experienced as combined stresses, their effects under real field conditions must be studied.…”

“…Furthermore, if temperature increase in levels higher than optimum plant growth temperature, CO 2 enrichment becomes deleterious and can exacerbate the negative effects of elevated temperature since the stomatal closure induced by CO 2 contributes to elevating leaf temperature due to reduced evapotranspiration rates [114]. In this case, elevated temperature and CO 2 enrichment would result in lower maize yields [110,114]. Hatfield et al (2011) [113] concluded that future increases in temperature and CO 2 would result in a minimum of 3% decrease in maize under well-watered conditions.…”