Figure 1.

An overview of abiotic stress response sensing, signal transduction, and regulation in plant cells. Plant cells can perceive/sense abiotic stress in several cellular compartments, and the signal transducers (e.g., secondary messengers such as Ca²⁺, ROS, phytohormones, kinases, and signalling (small) peptides) trigger the regulatory pathways involving transcription, posttranscription modifications, translation, posttranslational modifications, and epigenetic regulation. Multiple stress signals activate the stress-responsive transcription factors, which then regulate the stress-inducible gene expression cascade. Some stress-inducible genes code for functional proteins that directly impact role in stress tolerance; others encode regulatory proteins such as signal transducers.