Abiotic Stress Adaptation in Plants

Environmental insults such as extremes of temperature, extremes of water status as well as deteriorating soil conditions pose major threats to agriculture and food security. Employing contemporary tools and techniques from all branches of science, attempts are being made worldwide to understand how plants respond to abiotic stresses with the aim to help manipulate plant performance that will be better suited to withstand these stresses. The present book on abiotic stress is an attempt to search for possible answers to several basic questions related to plant responses towards abiotic stresses. This book presents a holistic view of the general principles of stress perception, signal transduction and regulation of gene expression. Further, chapters in this book analyze not only model systems but extrapolate interpretations obtained from models to crops. Lastly, we discuss how stress-tolerant crop or model plants have been or are being raised through plant breeding and genetic engineering approaches. Twenty three chapters, written by international authorities, integrate molecular details with overall plant structure and physiology, in a text-book style, including key references. This book serves as a complete package on the basics and applications for abiotic stress response sensing and genetic and metabolic response pathways in plants; it is designed for use by advanced undergraduate students, graduate students and beginning researchers in the area of stress biology, plant molecular biology, plant physiology, agriculture, biochemistry and environmental biology.

Dedication.-Preface.-The Editors.-List of Contributors.-Author Index.-Color plates.-1. Abiotic Tolerance and Crop Improvement.-I.Stress Perception and Signal Transduction:2.Sensors and Signal Transducers of Environmental Stress in Cyanobacteria.-3.Stress Signaling I:The Role of Abscisic Acid.-4.Stress Signaling II: Calcium Sensing and Signaling.-5.Stress Signaling III: Reactive Oxygen Species.-6.A Biotic or Abiotic Stress?.-7. Protein Kinases and Phosphatases for Stress Signal Transduction in Plants.-8.Chemical Root to Shoot Signaling via the Xylem under Drought.-II.Stress Regulation of Gene Expression:9.Abiotic Stress Responses: Complexities of Gene Expression.-10.Promoters and Transcription Factors in Abiotic Stress-responsive Gene Expression.-11.Epigenetic Regulation: microRNA Chromatin Modeling.-III. Physiology and Metabolism:12.Ion Homeostasis.-13.Glutathione Homeostasis: Crucial.-14.Water Balance and the Regulation of Stomatal Movements.-15.Responses to Macronutrient Deprivation.-16. Osmolyte Regulation.-17.Programmed Cell Death in Plant.-IV.Overcoming Stress:18. Breeding Efforts.-19. Transgenic Approaches.-20.Marker Assisted Breeding.-21.Stress, Mutators, Mutations and Stress Resistance.-22.Systems Biology of Abiotic Stress: the Elephant and the Blind Men.-23.Global Change, Stress and Plant Productivity.-Index.