Osmoregulation Mechanism of Drought Stress and Genetic EngineeringStrategies for Improving Drought Resistance in Plants

Drought, one of the main adverse environmental factors, obviously affected plant growth and development. Many adaptive strategies have been developed in plants for coping with drought or water stress, among which osmoregulation is one of the important factors of plant drought tolerance. Many substances play important roles in plant osmoregulation for drought resistance, including proline, glycine betaine, Lea proteins and soluble sugars such as levan, trehalose, sucrose, etc. The osmoregulation mechanism and the genetic engineering of plant drought-tolerance are reviewed in this paper.