Aquaporins as potential drought tolerance inducing proteins: Towards instigating stress tolerance

Biological Significance Knowledge on the role of AQPs in maintaining cellular water homeostasis has given new hope for developing drought tolerance in crop plants. Since drought is one of the major abiotic stresses affecting agricultural production worldwide, it has become a critical agenda to focus research on the development of drought‐tolerant crop plants. AQPs can act as key candidate molecules to solve this problem through genetic engineering. For this, it is important to understand the molecular mechanisms and inter‐related pathways through which AQPs induce drought tolerance and to explore the signaling network/s involved in such pathways.