Heat shock proteins and abiotic stress tolerance in plants

Abstract

Abiotic stresses restrict plant growth and development, and reduce harvest index of many crop species worldwide. Maintenance of native conformation of proteins and reducing the accumulation of non-native proteins are imperative for survival under stress conditions as such stresses frequently lead to protein aggregation causing metabolic dysfunction. Heat shock proteins (HSP) play a key role in conferring abiotic stress tolerance. Plants protect themselves from numerous stresses by inducing HSP, besides some stress-responsive proteins, suggesting analogous response mechanisms. A close association between the HSP and ROS also co-exists, indicating that plants have evolved to gain a higher degree of regulation over ROS toxicity and can use ROS as elicitor to induce HSP for better adaptations through activating an array of molecules. Therefore, unraveling the mechanisms of plant response against various stress and the role of HSP in acquired stress tolerance is utmost important to delineate their specific function as a part of stress-responsive module. The HSP have been well characterized in different crop species, albeit the knowledge about their correlation with genome sequence information as well as their functional plasticity is limited.