The Role of Abscisic Acid in Plant Abiotic Stress Responses

Dear Colleagues,

Plant growth and development are altered by environmental abiotic stresses, the harmful effects of which are increased by climate change and global warming. Hence, alone or in combination, abiotic stresses have become a key factor collectively limiting agricultural yield and productivity worldwide. To hamper the consequences of abiotic stress, plants have designed molecular mechanisms of resilience to produce a large number of stress-responsive gene products. Some of them are involved in short-term plant responses to avoid abiotic stress, but others are involved in long-term plant stress tolerance. Abiotic stress-responsive gene products include chaperone proteins, enzymes involved in phytohormones biosynthesis and metabolism, water channel and transport proteins, detoxification enzymes, and a variety of signal transduction proteins including kinases, phosphatases, and transcription factors. Among plant hormones controlling molecular mechanisms of resilience, abscisic acid (ABA) has been regarded as the universal stress hormone. However, hormonal crosstalk with other hormones is crucial to fine-tune plant stress responses, especially when a combination of abiotic stresses occur in crop fields.

The ABA signaling pathway has been shown to be very complex, with a multitude of regulatory components that act both positively to transduce the signal or negatively to block it. Moreover, phosphorylation/dephosphorylation events and protein modifications such as nitration, ubiquitylation, or sumolization are used by the plant to modulate the ABA signaling output. The discovery of new elements modulating the ABA signaling pathway will extend our knowledge of the regulation of plants’ abiotic stress responses. Moreover, new omics technologies will allow the study of non-model plants, pointing to new and specific gene functions in abiotic stress responses.

Therefore, this Special Issue will focus on the latest findings in all these aspects of the role developed by ABA in mechanisms steering plant responses to abiotic stresses.

Dr. Miguel González-Guzmán
Dr. Vicente Arbona
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Plants is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• abscisic acid
• plant tolerance
• model and non-model plants
• hormonal crosstalk
• stress combination
• omics technology