The critical role of autophagy in plant responses to abiotic stresses

Abstract

Autophagy is an evolutionary conserved recycling process in eukaryotes whereby intracellular components are engulfed by autophagosomes, which are subsequently transferred to the vacuoles for further degradation and reuse. In organisms like yeast and metazoans, autophagy is actively engaged during environmental perturbation either by degrading denatured proteins and organelles or by interfacing with stress related signaling molecules. Studies over the last decade have also revealed numerous important mechanisms where autophagy is widely involved in plant abiotic stress responses. Autophagy serves as a pivotal route for nutrient remobilization by the degradation of superfluous or damaged cellular cytoplasmic material and organelles. It is also reported to regulate the accumulation of reactive oxygen species, to maintain the cellular redox balance of plants under stressful conditions. Furthermore, autophagy is essential in regulating cellular toxicity by removing aggregated and/or denatured proteins and thereby improving plant stress tolerance. In this review, recent advances in our understanding of autophagy, along with pathways and regulatory networks through which it influences many aspects of plant growth and development in response to nutrient starvation, oxidative stress, osmotic stress and extreme temperatures are discussed.

Keywords

abiotic stresses / autophagy / extreme temperature / nutrient starvation / osmotic stress / oxidative stress

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFD0201001) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31401877).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Yu Wang, Jie Zhou, and Jingquan Yu declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article is a review and does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2017. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)