Biology and Biotechnology of Environmental Stress Tolerance in Plants, Volume 3: Sustainable Approaches for

Enhancing Envir

l Stress Tolerance. Aryadeep Roychoudhury (Ed.)

© 2024 Apple A

with CRC Press (Taylor & Francis)

onmenta

ca

published

demic Press, Inc. Co-

CHAPTER 12

Epigenetics – The Molecular Tool in

Understanding Abiotic Stress Response

in Plants

KAKAN BALL and SANJOY SADHUKHAN

Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory, Department of Botany,

Raiganj University, Raiganj – 733134, Uttar Dinajpur, West Bengal, India,

E-mails: [email protected] (K. Ball);

[email protected] (S. Sadhukhan)

ABSTRACT

Sessile plants are considered the most adaptable organisms of nature, able to

change themselves depending on the environmental conditions to which they

are exposed. If the conditions are favorable, plants grow effortlessly while

in adverse conditions they are unable to maintain their normal activities.

‘Stress’ is regarded as the conditions which are unsuitable for the growth

and survival of plants. Plants have to constantly struggle with a plethora of

abiotic and biotic challenges of the environment for their survival in nature.

On this planet, plants are continuously facing diverse abiotic stresses which

impart a detrimental impact on their growth, development, as well as crop

production. In response to this stress, plants have developed various mecha­

nisms to survive and adapt to nature. Since plants are sessile, they have a

bunch of signaling pathways for perceiving and conveying environmental

signals, which results in dynamic reprogramming of transcription. Plant’s

development and environmental signals promote epigenetic changes in the

genome. Plant cells produce numerous epigenomes due to cellular as well as

natural signals; thus, epigenetics becomes the topic of interest. Epigenetics is