Journal of Experimental Botany, Vol. 52, No. 363, pp. 0,
October 1, 2001
© 2001 Oxford University Press
Original Papers |
Preface
University of Würzburg, October 2000
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Introduction |
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 Top Introduction |
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There is no life without stress or, to put it even more extremely, life itself is stress. These are not philosophical deliberations about the human condition in general or wisdom taken from a survival guide for the modern corporate world. Rather, they are frequent conclusions from studies that have looked closely at living organisms in their natural surroundings. Stressful conditions and events are ever-present and ever-changing in quality and quantity. No individual will live long enough to enjoy that ‘statistically most improbable’ moment of a complete absence of stress. The Garden of Eden or paradise are terms that recur in human thinking over the millennia that stand for this ideal of life without need and danger—life without stress.
The importance of stress in the life of plants can be recognized because considerable portions of the information in the plant genome can be attributed to essential functions for coping with physical, chemical, and biotic stresses. Plants are especially dependent on intricate regulatory, biochemical, physiological, anatomical, and morphological tools for withstanding environmental stress, competition, herbivory, and disease, as they lack mobility and behaviour. Thus, understanding ‘normal’ plant function can, in fact, only mean analysing plant function under a tolerable combination of abiotic and biotic stress factors. Untangling this intricate mesh of cause and effect, genetic adaptation and phenotypic plasticity, is a primary objective of plant science. One of the most promising experimental approaches for cutting this Gordian knot is to single out the stress factors one by one and to study the concomitant responses on different levels of integration—from gene regulation to the community level.
The stress factors that plants experience in their natural habitat or in managed fields, pastures, and forests are not exclusively of natural origin. Human industrial activity, traffic, and agriculture have accentuated certain stress factors or introduced new ones that had not been acting on plants (and other organisms) in pre-industrial times. Thus, stress research may have important applied aspects when it analyses and predicts the resilience of plants, communities, and ecosystems to anthropogenic stress factors.
The objective of this special issue is to illustrate the depth and breadth of plant stress biology and to provide concise updates on the knowledge in selected fields of the physiology and ecology of stress in plants. The short review articles presented here are invited contributions from papers presented at a colloquium held in October 2000 at Retzbach, Germany. This meeting marked the end of a major collaborative effort devoted to various aspects of stress in biology which, over the past 12 years, had involved 20 research groups at the University of Würzburg. Generous financial support for this co-operative research centre (Sonderforschungsbereich 251 ‘Ökologie, Physiologie und Biochemie pflanzlicher und tierischer Leistungen unter Stress’) was provided by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Bavarian Ministry for Research, and the University of Würzburg.
I am indebted to the authors of the papers in this issue for timely submission and revision, numerous reviewers for critical comments and helpful advice, and to the staff at the Journal of Experimental Botany office for most elegantly navigating the manuscripts through the whole process.
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