Coping Abiotic Stress with Plant Volatile Organic Chemicals (PVOCs): A Promising Approach - Crop Improvement: New Approaches and Modern Techniques - page 292

Chapter 9
Coping Abiotic Stress with Plant Volatile
Organic Chemicals (PVOCs): A Promising
Approach
Penna Suprasanna and Prasad Shekhar Variyar
Abstract Abiotic stresses including salinity are a major threat to agricultural pro-
ductivity and hence global food security. Crop plants have adopted specialized
strategies to reduce the impact of stress. The biogenic volatile organic compounds
(VOCs) emitted from a wide range of plants help enable the buildup defense
against biotic and abiotic stresses. Plant VOCs are comprised of different isoprene
and monoterpene class of compounds in addition to alkanes, alkenes, carbonyls,
alcohols, esters, ethers, and acids which have a demonstrated role against abiotic
stress factors. Although it has been shown that several metabolic pathways may be
involved in building up the defense, antioxidant route of alleviation is believed to
be a common mechanism. The identification of the genes, transcriptomic profiling
and proteins of the biosynthetic pathway has enabled ways to manipulate the syn-
thesis of isoprenoid compounds. In recent years, there has been a growing interest
in adopting VOC strategy to alleviate abiotic stresses in crop plants.
Introduction
Environmental stress is a major threat to agricultural productivity and plants have
adopted specialized strategies to reduce the impact of stress. The abiotic stresses
include drought, salinity, cold and high temperature that affect the plant growth, de-
velopment and yields of crop plants. Plants being sessile, experience multiple stress-
es in their life cycle and hence the tolerance trait has become complex to be under-
stood and managed. Among the different abiotic stresses, salinity stress is the most
severe limiting crop productivity. Salinity interferes with the plant's accessibility to