Response of Plants to Drought Stress: A Review

Abstract

Stress tolerance has long been fascinated plant biologists as a challenge to understand the mechanism of plant survival under biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Exposure to abiotic stresses such as high salinity, drought, extreme light and temperature of plants results in worldwide major loss in crop productivity. The main cause of crop loss worldwide is abiotic stresses, reducing average yield for most major crop plants by more than 50%. The complexity in research efforts on drought tolerance was introduced mainly because of dichotomy of survival and productivity, adaptation, acclimation, inducement, enhancement and the levels of investigation like community, canopy, and organ, cellular and molecular.

Water is a vital resource for plant growth and survival and is often limiting in arid regions. Plants have to adjust their water balance and metabolism in response to the challenging environment of drought. At cellular level, water relation parameters, osmotically active metabolites and antioxidants have proved important to water balancing under varying environmental conditions.