Abstract
Abiotic stresses, mostly drought and salinity, are the major environmental factors which limit plant distribution in nature and reduce crop yields worldwide. The biotechnological improvement of crop stress tolerance would significantly contribute to the needed increase in food production, but requires a deep understanding of the mechanisms underlying plant responses to stress. Accumulation of osmolytes is one of those responses, which appears to be essential for tolerance in many species. Their main assumed role is to contribute to osmotic adjustment under conditions causing cellular dehydration, but they also have osmoprotectant functions as low-molecular-weight chaperons and reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavengers. Yet, important aspects of their mechanisms of action remain largely unknown, especially regarding the relevance and relative contribution of specific osmolytes to the stress tolerance of a given species. This gap in our knowledge is partly due to the experimental approaches commonly used to study those mechanisms, which have focused on non-tolerant model species and/or experiments performed under controlled – but artificial – laboratory or greenhouse setups.
In this review, we will summarise the (relatively scarce) data from field studies on the accumulation of different osmolytes in wild plants adapted to distinct stressful environments: saline, arid and gypsum habitats. We propose that more effort and resources should be invested on the study of the stress responses of wild plants in their natural habitats, as a complement to greenhouse experiments. We believe that this approach will significantly enhance our knowledge on this specific topic and could eventually be applied to the genetic improvement of crops.
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Vicente, O., Al Hassan, M., Boscaiu, M. (2016). Contribution of Osmolyte Accumulation to Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Wild Plants Adapted to Different Stressful Environments. In: Iqbal, N., Nazar, R., A. Khan, N. (eds) Osmolytes and Plants Acclimation to Changing Environment: Emerging Omics Technologies. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2616-1_2
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