Plant transcription factors: important factors controlling oxidative stress in plants

Various environmental factors like drought, heavy metal toxicity, salinity, extreme temperature, and pathogen infection create oxidative stress in plants via the generation of excessive reactive oxygen species (ROS). Oxidative stress has disastrous effects on normal plant growth and development and results in damage of proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and metabolites, leading to cell death. ROS are highly reactive species, including hydroxyl radicals, superoxide radicals, hydrogen peroxide, and singlet oxygen, which activate signaling pathways leading to molecular, biochemical, and physiological changes in plant cells. The research findings enlightened that ROS acts as plants signaling regulatory molecules in various metabolic processes like abiotic stress response, programmed cell death, defense from pathogens and systemic signaling. In response to oxidative stress, plants react via crosstalk between different signal transduction pathways involving transcription factors (TFs). Transcription factors have a key role in gene expression regulation in plants and are also termed as regulons. In the present chapter, we discuss ROS metabolism and the role of TFs in combating oxidative stress through gene expression regulation.