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Biology and Biotechnology of Environmental Stress Tolerance in Plants, Volume 3

13.1 INTRODUCTION

Any environmental condition that harms the growth and development of

plants, crop quality, and yield is referred to as stress. The stress response is

induced in all plants, resulting in either stress escape (survive under stress

treatment in metabolically inactive dormant phase) or stress resistance.

Stress resistance comprises stress avoidance, or a plant response aimed at

maintaining unstressed conditions at the cellular and tissue levels, as well as

stress tolerance, or an active plant stress response to a changing environment

(Kosava et al., 2018).

Proteins are important in stress response because they are directly

involved in developing new phenotypes by adapting physiological character­

istics to environmental changes. Proteins are the crucial executors of cellular

processes and key players in the maintenance of cellular homeostasis;

proteins contribute directly to the formation of new plant phenotypes by

regulating physiological properties to adapt to changes in the environment

(Rodziewicz et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2019). However, the individual protein

behavior rarely reflects the plant’s complex network of signals and dynamic

regulation of cellular processes in response to abiotic stress. In addition, it is

considered that the plant system reacts to abiotic stress as a complex system

with numerous signal connections and crosstalk, as well as a diverse variety

of stress tolerance-related proteins. As a result, several proteins in the stress

response are likely to be working together and play a crucial role in the

tolerance mechanism. Many of our previous research of plant responses to

abiotic stress emerges from genetic, genomic, and transcriptomic strategies.

Although the study of gene and mRNA abundance has considerably aided

our understanding of the plant response to various stress, there is usually a

weak connection between mRNA expression levels and protein levels (Liu

et al., 2019). Proteomic research is conducted to discover novel proteins,

as well as disclose their activities and the regulatory networks that control

their expression (Hakeem et al., 2012). Proteomics is growing rapidly in

three areas of plant science: (i) cellular and subcellular; (ii) structural and

developmental biology; and (iii) physiological and genetic research.

Recent advances in quantitative proteomics studies utilizing high-reso­

lution and mass-accuracy instruments significantly contributed to the iden­

tification of proteins and their expression profile under stressed and normal

conditions (Ghosh & Xu, 2014; Ahmad et al., 2016). Proteomic analysis for

both model and non-model plant species was achieved through systematic

high-throughput methodologies including 2D-PAGE (2 dimensional-poly