Natural Stress - Cold

Cold

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). In the U.S. one of the largest industries is agriculture. 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. 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. 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).