Molecular Tolerance Mechanism towards Environmental Stress in Crops Issue

Dear Colleagues,

Plants are sensitive to ever-changing environmental stress, leading to hampered crop growth and yield to a great extent. However, abiotic stresses cause dramatic changes to biochemical and molecular processes operating in plants. Several studies have revealed that various proteins respond to these stresses at pre- and post-transcriptional and translational levels. Knowing the role of these stress-inducible proteins may provide crucial insights to comprehensively elucidate the processes of stress tolerance in plants.

Plants use their defense mechanism to combat stress and to maintain their growth and development, which can take the form of avoidance, escaping, tolerance, and resistance. In fact, external stress activates diverse expressions of defense signaling. The production of excessive reactive oxygen species (ROS) is a hallmark of abiotic stress. Nonetheless, various protective mechanisms such as enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants are important for maintaining the redox balance of stressed cells.

Proteomes play a vital role against multiple stresses. Thus, studying plants at proteomic levels could help us to understand the pathways involved in stress tolerance. Therefore, the identification of novel genes/proteins for tolerance of abiotic conditions and diverse germplasm and molecular technologies are essential to capture the genetic and proteomic complexity of the trait, to unravel the biochemical, physiological, and molecular basis of tolerance, and provide protein targets for molecular breeding.

This Special Issue invites original research and review articles on all aspects of environmental stress tolerance mechanisms for crop production, covering the diverse roles of stress proteins, genes of interest, hormone and signaling, and heavy metals’ toxicity through application of promising bioengineering tools, aiming to collect a great range of thrilling and fruitful molecular works. 

Prof. Dr. Sun Hee Woo
Guest Editor

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• Climate change
• Abiotic stress
• Bioengineering application
• Crop proteome
• Crop stress responses
• Interactomes
• Molecular chaperon
• Protein biomarkers
• ROS scavenging enzymes
• Stress signaling and gene expression