review · Frontiers in Plant Science
Global warming increases abiotic stresses that restrict plant growth, productivity, and food security. Melatonin is a plant hormone that enhances plant performance under these challenging conditions. It supports vital physiological and molecular processes, including seed germination, growth, photosynthesis, and carbon fixation. Melatonin increases the accumulation of protective osmolytes, sugars, and endogenous hormones such as auxin, gibberellic acid, and cytokinins. In addition, its antioxidant capabilities scavenge harmful reactive oxygen species by boosting enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidant activities, alongside upregulating stress-responsive genes. Because plants do not naturally produce enough melatonin to secure tolerance against severe stress, developing transgenic crops with elevated melatonin biosynthesis represents a viable strategy to enhance resilience in changing environmental conditions.
Rising temperatures and environmental stresses increasingly threaten global food security and crop yields. Understanding how natural plant compounds like melatonin mitigate environmental damage provides fundamental knowledge for agricultural resilience. Exploring melatonin pathways offers potential avenues to protect vital food crops against harsh climates without compromising essential growth processes.
The findings highlight transgenic crop development with enhanced melatonin biosynthesis as an approach to combat stress-induced yield losses. Agricultural biotechnology developers and crop breeders could potentially use these genetic targets to engineer climate-resilient plants. The technology remains at an early stage of research, as the abstract focuses on synthesis mechanisms, gene regulation, and future research directions rather than field-tested products.
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Global warming in this century increases incidences of various abiotic stresses restricting plant growth and productivity and posing a severe threat to global food production and security. The plant produces different osmolytes and hormones to combat the harmful effects of these abiotic stresses. Melatonin (MT) is a plant hormone that possesses excellent properties to improve plant performance under different abiotic stresses. It is associated with improved physiological and molecular processes linked with seed germination, growth and development, photosynthesis, carbon fixation, and plant defence against other abiotic stresses. In parallel, MT also increased the accumulation of multiple osmolytes, sugars and endogenous hormones (auxin, gibberellic acid, and cytokinins) to mediate resistance to stress. Stress condition in plants often produces reactive oxygen species. MT has excellent antioxidant properties and substantially scavenges reactive oxygen species by increasing the activity of enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants under stress conditions. Moreover, the upregulation of stress-responsive and antioxidant enzyme genes makes it an excellent stress-inducing molecule. However, MT produced in plants is not sufficient to induce stress tolerance. Therefore, the development of transgenic plants with improved MT biosynthesis could be a promising approach to enhancing stress tolerance. This review, therefore, focuses on the possible role of MT in the induction of various abiotic stresses in plants. We further discussed MT biosynthesis and the critical role of MT as a potential antioxidant for improving abiotic stress tolerance. In addition, we also addressed MT biosynthesis and shed light on future research directions. Therefore, this review would help readers learn more about MT in a changing environment and provide new suggestions on how this knowledge could be used to develop stress tolerance.
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DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2022.902694
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