Brassinosteroid: The Potential Steroid Hormone in Crop Improvements

Abstract

Plants being sessile in nature have faced tremendous environmental resistances and biotic stress factors as compared to any other living organisms in the world. The extreme resilience of plants is actually determined by their intricate signaling cascades and intracellular metabolic cross talks. Plants do not possess any humoral immune response and rely mostly on signaling reprogramming. Internal hormonal homeostasis plays a critical role in signal transduction mechanisms and stress tolerance in plants. The physiological and developmental functions carried out by the classical plant hormone e.g., auxins, gibberellic acid, cytokinin, abscisic acid, ethylene, etc. are well documented. Brassinosteroid is the class of emerging plant hormone which is a steroid in nature and has extreme potentiality in crop improvements. Although many physiological functions of this potent plant hormone have been documented but its application in stress is still intangible. In this context, the present article envisages different aspects of this important hormone.