Mutants as tools to understand cellular and molecular drought tolerance mechanisms
1996
Vartanian, N.
The use of mutants: a most promising way to detect genes involved in development or in response to environmental stress. The model species Arabidopsis, particularly amenable to dissect the genetics and molecular mechanisms underlying physiological responses, also offers the advantage of a wide variety of mutants. As far as drought tolerance is concerned, hormonal mutants, impaired in hormone biosynthesis--deficient mutants--or in the signal transduction pathway--responsive mutants--provide a valuable tool to analyse the role of phytohormone interaction in the plant drought behaviour as well as to differentiate the mutant phenotypes with new criteria. These two categories of mutants (in particular the abscisic acid, ABA, mutants) were shown to be affected in developmental processes during seed maturation--in the desiccation phase--and/or in response to environmental stress (drought....) in vegetative tissues. The present report will focus on this last aspect: alterations in drought responses in vegetative tissues (adaptive strategies and drought tolerance mechanisms) essentially in Arabidopsis hormonal mutants (ABA-deficient and ABA-insensitive, GA-deficient, auxin and ethylene-insensitive). Some of the results are discussed with regard to the predicted functions of genes affected by the mutations.
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