Abstract
Environmental stress (mostly drought and high soil salinity) is
the major cause of reduction of crop yields, a problem which will
worsen in many regions because of the global climate change.
The improvement of abiotic stress tolerance in crops has become
an urgent need for the future of agriculture; transgenic plants
expressing genes conferring tolerance provide the most promising
strategy to achieve this goal. However, this approach requires a
deep understanding of the mechanisms of stress tolerance in plants,
which are still largely unknown. Paradoxically, most studies on the
responses of plants to abiotic stress have been performed using
stress-sensitive species such as Arabidopsis thaliana. However,
there are plants (halophytes, gypsophytes, xerophytes.) adapted to
extremely harsh environmental conditions in their natural habitats,
which we propose as more suitable models to investigate
these mechanisms, and as a source of biotechnological tools (stress
tolerance genes, stress-inducible promoters) for the genetic engineering
of stress tolerance in crop plants.
