Maintenance of Membrane Integrity in Plants under Stress

Dear Colleagues,

Severe environmental stresses deriving from climatic changes increasingly affect plants physiological processes and productivity. Membranes are crucial selective homeostatic barriers that ensure cell compartment and metabolism. They are also main targets of abiotic stresses, acting as buffer interfaces able to adjust under changing environment. A better photosynthetic performance may rely on a higher protoplasmic tolerance, a beneficial trait for plants survival in adverse environments. Simple techniques, like electrolyte leakage test, contribute to evaluate injury caused by stresses mainly at plasma membrane level. Injury index may be complemented with several integrative physiological parameters such as gas exchanges, chlorophyll a fluorescence and plant water relations, among others. Injury mainly results from damages occurring in membrane lipid composition, which differs between plant species, and varies according to plant organ and cell organelle. At these levels stress tolerance greatly depends on how stress affects membrane lipids which play major structural functions in membranes, but have also important roles in plant signalling under stress. Triggering biosynthesis of new lipid molecules, reducing susceptibility to lipoperoxidation through a decrease of unsaturated fatty acids under differentiated gene expression is essential for the adequate functioning of thylakoid membranes and photosynthesis. A better ability to cope with oxidative stress and membrane damages will confer an evolutive advantage under adverse environments.

These, as many others physiological approaches concerning membranes, can be envisaged at different plant levels, and contribute to germplasm phenotyping under stress conditions. Nowadays this is even more urgent due to an extreme need to explore genetic diversity in order to find traits that might be used for crops improvement and adaptation to climate changes.

We encourage Plant Scientists community to publish in this Special Issue on “Maintenance of Membrane Integrity in Plants under Stress” in Plants-MDPI; original research papers, as well reviews related to this topic, are welcome. We also aim to gather multidisciplinary works reflecting complementary expertise from agronomical field observations and phenotyping, to physiological, biochemical and molecular studies. It is our hope that a joint effort to integrate knowledge obtained in different domains may help to raise new and realistic insights on plant responses to stresses and contribute to sustainable strategies in agriculture to face emerging climate threats.

Dr. Paula Scotti
Dr. Fernanda Simões
Guest Editors

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• ecophysiological traits
• stress responses
• membrane integrity
• genetic diversity
• functional genomics