Agricultural production and quality are adversely affected by various abiotic stresses worldwide and this will be exacerbated by the deterioration of global climate. To feed a growing world population, it is very urgent to breed stress-tolerant crops with higher yields and improved qualities against multiple environmental stresses. Since conventional breeding approaches had marginal success due...

Pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) proteins are extensive in all eukaryotes. Their functions remain as yet largely unknown. Mining potential stress responsive PPRs, and checking whether known PPR editing factors are affected in the stress treatments. It is beneficial to elucidate the regulation mechanism of PPRs involved in biotic and abiotic stress. Here, we explored the characteristics and origin...

Environmental conditions are strong selective forces, which may influence adaptation and speciation. The wild tomato species Solanum chilense, native to South America, is exposed to a range of abiotic stress factors. To identify signatures of natural selection and local adaptation, we analysed 16 genes involved in the abiotic stress response and compared the results to a set of reference genes ...

Drought and other abiotic stresses negatively affect plant growth and development and thus reduce productivity. The plant-specific NAM/ATAF1/2/CUC2 (NAC) transcription factors have important roles in abiotic stress-responsive signaling. Here, we show that Arabidopsis thaliana NAC016 is involved in drought stress responses; nac016 mutants have high drought tolerance, and NAC016-overexpressing (N...

Abiotic stresses such as high temperature, salinity, and drought adversely affect the survival, growth, and reproduction of plants. Plants respond to such unfavorable changes through developmental, physiological, and biochemical ways, and these responses require expression of stress-responsive genes, which are regulated by a network of transcription factors (TFs), including heat stress transcri...

The accumulation of a number of small RNAs in plants is affected by abscisic acid (ABA) and abiotic stresses, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. The miR168-mediated feedback regulatory loop regulates ARGONAUTE1 (AGO1) homeostasis, which is crucial for gene expression modulation and plant development. Here, we reveal a transcriptional regulatory mechanism by which MIR168 contro...

Ethylene is essential for many developmental processes and a key mediator of biotic and abiotic stress responses in plants. The ethylene signaling and response pathway includes Ethylene Response Factors (ERFs), which belong to the transcription factor family APETALA2/ERF. It is well known that ERFs regulate molecular response to pathogen attack by binding to sequences containing AGCCGCC motifs ...

Ethylene is essential for many developmental processes and a key mediator of biotic and abiotic stress responses in plants. The ethylene signaling and response pathway includes Ethylene Response Factors (ERFs), which belong to the transcription factor family APETALA2/ERF. It is well known that ERFs regulate molecular response to pathogen attack by binding to sequences containing AGCCGCC motifs ...

Salt stress is one of the major abiotic stresses in agriculture worldwide. Analysis of natural genetic variation in Arabidopsis is an effective approach to characterize candidate salt responsive genes. Differences in salt tolerance of three Arabidopsis ecotypes were compared in this study based on their responses to salt treatments at two developmental stages: seed germination and later growth....

Abscisic acid (ABA) is known to play roles in regulating plant tolerance to various abiotic stresses, but whether ABA's effects on heat tolerance are associated with its regulation of heat stress transcription factors (HSFs) and heat shock proteins (HSPs) is not well documented. The objective of this study was to determine whether improved heat tolerance of tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Schr...