Stress Tolerance in GM Plants : A Review

With climate change, increasing proportion of arid lands, changes in precipitation patterns and increasing proportion of polluted soils, scientists are looking for ways to face the challenges of modern agriculture. Abiotic stresses, like drought, saline soils and extreme temperatures, are hindrances in crop cultivation that must be seriously considered, since these adversely affect plant growth and productivity. A new review published by Plant Cell Reports summarizes the recent transgenic approaches for introducing abiotic stress tolerance to plants.

 The authors enumerated the genes that are usually targeted to improve plant tolerance to various stresses. These include genes that code for: osmoprotectants or molecules that accumulate during osmotic adjustments, detoxifying agents that include anti-oxidants and enzymes that protect the cell from damages by highly reactive oxygen species, late embryogenesis (LEA) proteins that accumulate in response to water scarcity, heat shock proteins, transcription factors and signal transduction molecules. They also discussed the evaluation of abiotic stress response and the protocols for testing the transgenic plants for their tolerance under close to-field conditions.

The review is available to subscribers at http://www.springerlink.com/content/u3428341j7r95613/fulltext.pdf Non subscribers can read the abstract at http://www.springerlink.com/content/u3428341j7r95613/?p=18b654251e4d41c59c78b25282d9c32b&pi=7