CHAPTER 13 Impact of transcription factors in plant abiotic stress: a recent advancement for crop improvement Divya Chauhan 1 , Devendra Singh 2 , Himanshu Pandey 3 , Zeba Khan 4 , Rakesh Srivastava 4 , Vinay Kumar Dhiman 5 and Vivek Kumar Dhiman 6 1 Division of Germplasm, ICAR-National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, New Delhi, Delhi, India 2 Department of Biotechnology, B.N. College of Engineering and Technology, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India 3 Department of Biotechnology, Dr. YSP UHF Nauni, Solan, Himachal Pradesh, India 4 Molecular Biology and Biotechnology Division, CSIR-National Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India 5 Department of Basic Sciences, Dr. YSP UHF Nauni, Solan, Himachal Pradesh, India 6 Departmnt of Biotechnology, Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India 13.1 Introduction Environment fluctuations pose harmful effects on plants at different phonological stages. During signal- ing events, interactions in the environment are monitored and controlled by regulatory molecules at cellu- lar levels (Srivastava et al., 2014; Takahashi and Shinozaki, 2019). Responses to internal signals between interacting partners are coordinated by transcription factors (TFs) in the developmental processes of plants, which facilitate signaling pathways against biotic as well as abiotic stimuli (Joshi et al., 2016). TFs function with other transcriptional regulators such as chromatin-modifying/remodeling proteins or corepressor/corepressor (Srivastava et al., 2018; Pandey et al., 2019). These TFs regulate the expression of different downstream genes via interacting with the cis-elements present on the promoter region of the genes (Udvardi et al., 2007; Agarwal and Jha, 2010; Srivastava et al., 2018; Agarwal et al., 2020). A study by Riechmann et al. (2000) revealed the expression of 1500 TFs in Arabidopsis thaliana imparting abiotic stress. In plants, TFs account for about 5%7% of genome coding sequences (Hoang et al., 2017). Expression studies in Arabidopsis suggest different pathways responding differently to environ- mental stress. Hence, these stress-responsive TFs could act as crucial targets for economical crops to enhance abiotic stress tolerance. 13.2 Regulatory function of transcription factors in response to abiotic stress Environmental stimuli are primarily detected by transcellular membrane sensors that comprise Ca 21 bind- ing proteins and sensors, G-protein coupled receptors, and histidine kinases (Kaur et al., 2021a, 2021b, 2022; Taneja and Upadhyay, 2021; Upadhyay, 2021). As a result of such actions, stimulation of 271 Plant Transcription Factors. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-90613-5.00005-4 © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.