Engineering plants to tolerate abiotic stresses

Abiotic stresses present major challenges in sustaining crop yield. They trigger responses involving molecular mechanisms for cellular adjustments, including signal perception and transduction cascades, transcriptional networks and adaptive metabolic pathways. The past decade has witnessed the completion of genome projects of several model plant species and many candidate genes involved in stress tolerance have been identified, expanding the germplasm pool to facilitate genetic engineering. Transgenic technology has accelerated the production of novel stress-tolerant varieties in parallel with conventional breeding. In this review article, various transcription factors, metabolic pathways and effector molecules that are candidates for genetic manipulation to achieve abiotic stress tolerance are discussed.