Natural Stress

In regard to agriculture, Abiotic stress is stress produced by natural environment factors such as extreme temperatures, wind, drought, and salinity. Humankind doesn’t have much control over abiotic stresses. It is very important for humans to understand how stress factors affect plants and other living things so that we can take some preventative measures.

Preventative measures are the only way that humans can protect themselves and their possessions from abiotic stress. There are many different types of abiotic stressors, and several methods that humans can use to reduce the negative effects of stress on living things.

One of the types of Abiotic Stress is cold. This has a huge impact on farmers. Cold impacts crop growers all over the world in every single country. Yields suffer and farmers also suffer huge losses because the weather is just too cold to produce crops (Xiong & Zhu, 2001).

Humans have planned the planting of our crops around the seasons. Even though the seasons are fairly predictable, there are always unexpected storms, heat waves, or cold snaps that can ruin our growing seasons.(Suzuki & Mittler, 2006)

ROS stands for reactive oxygen species. ROS plays a large role in mediating events through transduction. Cold stress was shown to enhance the transcript, protein, and activity of different ROS-scavenging enzymes. Low temperature stress has also been shown to increase the H2 O2 accumulation in cells.(Suzuki & Mittler, 2006)

Plants can be acclimated to low or even freezing temperatures. If a plant can go through a mild cold spell this activates the cold-responsive genes in the plant. Then if the temperature drops again, the genes will have conditioned the plant to cope with the low temperature. Even below freezing temperatures can be survived if the proper genes are activated (Suzuki & Mittler, 2006).

Heat stress has been shown to cause problems in functions and can result in oxidative damage. Activators of heat stress receptors and defenses are thought to be related to ROS. Heat is another thing that plants can deal with if they have the proper pretreatment. This means that if the temperature gradually warms up the plants are going to be better able to cope with the change. A sudden long temperature increase could cause damage to the plant because their cells and receptors haven’t had enough time to prepare for a major temperature change.

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Wikipedia