Abstract
Environmental stresses caused by drought and extremes of temperature are main factors limiting plant growth, productivity and distribution and up to 80 % of the total crop losses are caused by such climatic factors (Boyer, 1982). Consequently, increase in plant stress tolerance could have a major impact on agricultural productivity. Genetic engineering has recently been shown to provide new approaches for plant breeding and considerable efforts has been made to design strategies for genetic engineering of stress tolerance (Thomashow, 1999; Nuotio et al., 2001). Unfortunately, developmental, structural and physiological adaptations to stresses are often based on complex mechanisms involving a number of different genes (McCue and Hanson, 1990) and therefore not amenable to genetic engineering. However, some of the responses to abiotic stress appear to be based on relatively simple metabolic traits governed by a limited number of genes.
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Tamminen, I. et al. (2002). Engineering Trehalose Biosynthesis Improves Stress Tolerance in Arabidopsis. In: Li, P.H., Palva, E.T. (eds) Plant Cold Hardiness. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0711-6_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0711-6_18
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