*Correspondence: Bojjam V. Vardhini, Department of Botany, Telangana University, Dichpally, Nizamabad 503322, India e-mail: drvidyavardhini@ rediffmail.com Various abiotic stress factors significantly contribute to major worldwide-losses in crop productivity by mainly impacting plant’s stress tolerance/adaptive capacity. The latter is largely governed by the efficiency of antioxidant defense sy...

Small heat shock proteins (smHSPs) play important and extensive roles in plant defenses against abiotic stresses. We cloned a gene for a smHSP from the David Lily (Lilium davidii (E. H. Wilson) Raffill var. Willmottiae), which we named LimHSP16.45 based on its protein molecular weight. Its expression was induced by many kinds of abiotic stresses in both the lily and transgenic plants of Arabido...

Abiotic stress represents a serious threat affecting both plant fitness and productivity. One of the promptest responses that plants trigger following abiotic stress is the differential expression of key genes, which enable to face the adverse conditions. It is accepted and shown that the cell wall senses and broadcasts the stress signal to the interior of the cell, by triggering a cascade of r...

Animals and plants respond to bacterial infections and environmental stresses by inducing overlapping repertoires of defense genes. How the signals associated with infection and abiotic stresses are differentially integrated within a whole organism remains to be fully addressed. We show that the transcription of a C. elegans ABC transporter, pgp-5 is induced by both bacterial infection and heav...

The auxin influx carriers auxin resistant 1/like aux 1 (AUX/LAX), efflux carriers pin-formed (PIN) (together with PIN-like proteins) and efflux/conditional P-glycoprotein (ABCB) are major protein families involved in auxin polar transport. However, how they function in responses to exogenous auxin and abiotic stresses in maize is largely unknown. In this work, the latest updated maize (Zea mays...

Plant hormones are the key regulators of adaptive stress response. Abiotic stresses such as drought and salt are known to affect the growth and productivity of plants. It is well known that the levels of plant hormones such as zeatin (ZA), abscisic acid (ABA), salicylic acid (SA), jasmonic acid (JA), and brassinolide (BR) fluctuate upon abiotic stress exposure. At present, there is not any sing...

Cyanobacteria are an important source of natural products. In this article, we briefly review the responses of cyanobacteria to different stresses. Abiotic stresses (temperature, salt, heavy metals, metalloid and ultraviolet (UV) influence cell growth and metabolism in cyanobacteria. Salt stress is a major abiotic factor that decrease...