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Physiology and Molecular Biology of Stress ... - KHAM PHA MOI

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Metabolic Engineering for <strong>Stress</strong> Tolerance<br />

261<br />

Table 2.<br />

Select “milestone” studies on metabolic engineering for<br />

stress tolerant plants<br />

Mechanism <strong>Stress</strong> tolerance References<br />

Fatty acid unsaturation Chilling Murata et. al. (1992)<br />

Antioxidation Oxidative stress, drought Gupta et. al. (1993a &<br />

1993b)<br />

Compatible solute synthesis Salinity, cold <strong>and</strong> freezing Tarczynski et. al. (1993)<br />

Heat shock proteins <strong>and</strong> Heat Lee et. al. (1995)<br />

Chaperones<br />

LEA proteins Salinity, Drought Xu et. al. (1996)<br />

Glutathione <strong>and</strong> amino Oxidative stress, Roxas et. al. (1997)<br />

acid metabolism<br />

drought, salinity<br />

Transcriptional control Cold, drought Jaglo-Ottosen et. al.<br />

<strong>of</strong> stress pathways (1998)<br />

Sodium vacuolar transport Salinity Apse et. al (1999)<br />

High concentrations <strong>of</strong> compatible solutes are non-toxic to the cells. So<br />

transgenic approaches can be used to facilitate their accumulation in crop plants for<br />

long-term osmotic stress tolerance (Chen <strong>and</strong> Murata, 2002; Serraj <strong>and</strong> Sinclair, 2002).<br />

Natural accumulation <strong>of</strong> osmoprotectants varies in plants i.e. 5-50 ìmol g -1 fresh weight<br />

(~6-60 mM on a plant water basis) <strong>and</strong> it <strong>of</strong>ten increases several-fold during exposure to<br />

osmotic stress (Rhodes <strong>and</strong> Hanson, 1993; Bohnert et. al., 1995). In plant cells,<br />

osmoprotectants are normally restricted to the cytosol, chloroplasts, <strong>and</strong> other cytoplasmic<br />

compartments.<br />

Many crop plants do not naturally synthesize high levels <strong>of</strong> osmoprotectants.<br />

Therefore, it was hoped that crop stress tolerance could be improved by introducing<br />

one or many genes implicated in the synthesis <strong>of</strong> a specific osmoprotectant. Hence,<br />

metabolic engineering <strong>of</strong> synthetic pathways to osmoprotectants has been vigorously<br />

pursued during the last decade. Some examples for metabolic engineering <strong>of</strong> plants for<br />

osmoprotectant synthesis are listed in Table 3 <strong>and</strong> are discussed below.<br />

3.1.1. Mannitol<br />

The sugar alcohol mannitol is synthesized in numerous species <strong>of</strong> plants <strong>and</strong> its accumulation<br />

increases under dehydration stress (Patonnier et al., 1999). In celery, a natural<br />

accumulator <strong>of</strong> mannitol, its synthesis from mannose-6-phosphate is catalyzed by mannose-6-phosphate<br />

reductase (M6PR). Under stress, there is down-regulation <strong>of</strong>

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