Protein Phosphatases and Stress Management in Plants

The regulation of the the phosphorylation and de-phosphorylation process, resulting in “cellular switches” that monitor normal plant physiology, growth and development, has immense potential in crop systems. While information on this subject is still largely in the nascent stage, coming from Arabidopsis and rice particularly,  the use of cell biology, genetic screens, and biochemical approaches aided by an omics approach should help unravel the detailed functional information available about signaling pathways in plants. The regulation could be exploited to develop crop varieties better equipped to handle changing environments and enhance agricultural productivity.        In the post-genomic era, one of the major challenges is investigation and understanding multiple genes and gene families regulating a particular physiological and developmental aspect of the plant life cycle. One of these important physiological processes is regulation of stress response, which leads to adaptation or adjustment in response to adverse stimuli. With the holistic understanding of the signaling pathways involving phosphatases, one gene family or multiple genes or gene families, plant biologists can lay a foundation for designing and generating future crops, which can withstand a higher degree of environmental stresses, especially abiotic stresses, which are the major cause of crop loss throughout the world.This book incorporates the contributions from leading plant biologists in the field of stress-mediated de-phosphorylation by phosphatases as an important task to elucidate the aspects of stress signaling by functional genomic approaches.