Improving plant stress tolerance: potential applications of engineered MAPK cascades.

The need to develop solutions to the problem of worldwide food crop scarcity under exacerbated climate change will be paramount. This motivates an effort to leverage agricultural biotechnology to improve plant adaptation to severe and multiple, simultaneous environmental stresses. Consequently, engineering synthetic signaling pathways, particularly mitogen activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascades utilizing components already involved in plant stress tolerance, is a worthy focus for research to breed new plant varieties with enhanced stress-tolerance traits.