The role of key transcription factors for cold tolerance in plants

Abstract In their natural environments, the plants face several biotic as well as abiotic stresses in single or in combination. Simultaneously, the increasing human interventions and every second increasing anthropogenic activities in the natural plant environments have made the plant systems more prone to multiple abiotic stresses. The range includes heat stress, heavy metal stress, salinity stress, drought stress, flood stress, metalloid stress, oxidative stress, and others, which together affect the optimum plant productivity. Among all these stresses, one of the most prominent stresses is cold stress (also known as low-temperature stress). It primarily affects the plant productivity by adversely reducing the activity of plant’s major enzymes (especially photosynthesis-related) as well as by destabilizing the cell membrane. The plants upon exposure to cold stress are subjected to either chilling injury or freezing injury. However, being intelligent, plants have evolved the ability to tolerate the low-temperature stress up to a certain level. The inelastic attitude of plasma membrane induces the expression of COR (cold responsive) genes which account for cold acclimatization in different plants. Plants undergo several physiological, transcriptional-level and biochemical changes such as a change in membrane composition, production of some specific solutes, and production of some precise proteinaceous molecules in response to cold stress. The exposure to cold stress triggers the expression of a number of transcription factors, which sequentially bind the promoter of various stress-reactive genetic elements and thereby control their expression and assist the plant in coping with the cold stress. Therefore, in this chapter, we have focused on the transcription factors induced by cold stress.