Original title: Abscisic Acid and Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Crop Plants
Plants often grow less when they face drought, salt, or cold, which can reduce harvests. Abscisic acid, or ABA, is a plant hormone that helps carry signals about these stresses. It regulates processes such as the opening of tiny pores in leaves and changes in gene expressionThe process by which a cell uses a gene to make a product, such as a protein., meaning which genes are active. This review describes how ABA signaling helps plants adapt to environmental stress.
Imagine packing for a day when the weather could turn dry, icy, or very salty from sea spray. It is hard to prepare if you do not know which condition is coming, and one response may not suit every problem. In this paper, ABA is the plant’s messenger: it helps signal the stress response, while the review describes how that signal relates to plant processes and active genes.
Drought, salt, and cold can slow plant growth and reduce crop yield. Understanding how ABA helps plants respond to these stresses may guide strategies for developing crops that tolerate difficult growing conditions.
The abstract describes the topics covered in a review, but gives no specific findings, experiments, or evidence that ABA engineering improves crop yields or stress tolerance. It does not identify particular crops, genes, or engineering methods, or compare ABA with other strategies.
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Abscisic Acid and Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Crop Plants — Saroj Kumar Sah, Kambham Raja Reddy, Jiaxu Li — Frontiers in Plant Science — doi:10.3389/fpls.2016.00571
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.