The Molecular Basis of ABA-Mediated Plant Response to Drought

‘Drought stress is as complicated and difficult to plant biology as cancer is to mammalian biology’ said Jian-Kang Zhu, a molecular geneticist at the University of California, River‐ side. The capacity of a plant to turn on or turn off a series of genes that further alter plant physiology and morphology allows a plant to tolerate, escape or avoid drought stress. Many countries around the world experience drought stress in different ways but it always leads to a decreased annual yield of crops. Deciphering the basis of the molecular response to stress and the mechanism for the adaptation and acquisition of tolerance can facilitate the creation of cultivars with increased drought tolerance. Drought response is a complex mech‐ anism that has been investigated using a broad spectrum of ‘omics’ techniques, such as mo‐ lecular genetics, functional genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics combined with advanced phenotyping techniques. The response of plants to dehydration stress has been extensively studied in a wide range of species with particular emphasis on model plants such as Arabidopsis. Taking advantage of the knowledge already obtained from Arabidopsis and other model species, it is possible to gain insight into the stress re‐ sponse in crops such as barley or wheat.