Author(s):

Sini Thomas, R Shiv Ramakrishnan, Ashish Kumar, Radheshyam Sharma, Medha Tiwari and Nidhi Pathak

Abstract: Climate change and global warming consequently causes environmental stresses affecting plant growth and productivity worldwide. Latest estimates suggest that two thirds of the yield potential of major crops are lost due to unfavourable environmental factor or abiotic stressors. Food shortage will be the common phenomenon in near future as the world population will reach about 10 billion by 2050. Therefore in order to feed the burgeoning population it is an urgent need to develop crop plants with enhanced vigour and high tolerance to various unfavourable environmental abiotic stressors. Maintaining yield stability under adverse environmental conditions is a major challenge faced by the modern agriculture in which the polyamines play a very important role in mitigating the devastating effect of various environmental factors. Polyamines (PAs) (putrescine, spermidine and spermine) are group of phytohormone-like aliphatic amine natural compounds with aliphatic nitrogen structure and present in almost all living organisms including plants. Among Polyamines, putrescine has more importance since it is the principal component and precursor for tertiary and quaternary PAs. Earlier studies proved that it is having role in diverse physiological processes such as flower development, embryogenesis, organogenesis, senescence, and fruit maturation and biotic and abiotic stress tolerance. Many studies suggested the probable mechanism of abiotic stress tolerance induced by putrescine which includes assisting an compatible solutes proline, glycine betaine and GABA in dehydration tolerance, stabilization of macromolecules and organellar membrane, inducig the production of antioxidant enzymes, playing as signal molecules in ABA regulated stress response pathway, regulators of several on channels, role in metabolic regulation of ammonia toxicity and nitric oxide (NO) production and regulating programmed cell death. Therefore, genetic manipulation of crop plants with genes encoding enzymes of polyamine biosynthetic pathways may provide better stress tolerance to crop plants. Furthermore, the exogenous application of PAs is also another option for increasing the stress tolerance potential in plants. Here, we have described the synthesis and role of various polyamines in abiotic stress tolerance in plants.

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