Oxidative Stress Studies in Plant Tissue Culture

Higher plants are sessile therefore are continuously exposed to different environmental stress factors, such as drought, salinity, heavy metals, nutritional disorders, radiation without any protection. Most of these stresses produce certain common effects on plants, like induced oxidative stress by overproduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS), besides their own specific effects (Rao, 2006). Thus, plants have developed their own specific response(s)against each of these stresses as well as cross-stress response(s). Investigating these responses is difficult under field conditions, but plant tissue culture techniques are performed under aseptic and controlled environmental conditions. These advantages of plant tissue culture allow various opportunities for researcher to study the unique and complex responses of plants against environmental stresses (Sakthivelu et al., 2008, Lokhande et al., 2011).

ROS have inevitably been factors for aerobic life since the introduction of molecular oxygen (O2) into our atmosphere by O2-evolving photosynthetic organisms. ROS can simply be described highly reactive and partially reduced-oxygen forms. ROS, including the super oxide radical (O2˙ˉ), singlet oxygen (1O2), hydroxyl radical (OH˙), hydroperoxyl radical (HO2˙), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) like that, are produced not only during metabolic pathway in several compartments of plants, including chloroplasts, mitochondria, peroxisomes, plasma membrane, apoplast, endoplasmic reticulum, and cell-wall but also as a result of induced environmental stress factors. When exposing of environmental stress factors, ROS levels can dramatically increase and this increase, in the later stage, leads to oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is defined a serious imbalance between the production of ROS and antioxidant defense and this situation can cause damage to cellular macro molecules, including proteins, lipids, carbohydrates and DNA (Mittler et al., 2004; Gill and Tuteja, 2010). Under steady-state conditions, the ROS are scavenged by various antioxidant defense systems: both enzymatic antioxidant(superoxide dismutase, SOD; catalase, CAT; ascorbate peroxidase, APX; glutathione reductase, GR; monodehydroascorbatereductase, MDHAR; dehydroascorbate reductase, DHAR; glutathione peroxidase, GPX;guaiacol peroxidase, POX and glutathione-S- transferase, GST) and non-enzymatic (ascorbate, glutathione, carotenoids, phenolic compounds, proline, glycine betain, sugar, and polyamines) defense systems (Foyer and Noctor, 2005; Desikan et al., 2005; Ahmad et al., 2008; Gill and Tuteja, 2010).

Plant tissue culture techniques are used to grow plants under aseptic and controlled environment for the purpose of both commercial (like mass production) and scientific (like germplasm preservation, plant breeding, physiological,and genetic) studies (www.kitchenculturekit.com). Two of these application areas are important to study ROS homeostasis in plants. The first one of these techniques is used as a model to induce oxidative stress under controlled conditions via different stressor agents for researching in vitro screening in plants against abiotic stress, studying and observing morphological, physiological and biochemical changes in both unorganized cellular (i.e. suspension cultures and callus cultures) and organized tissue (i.e. axillary shoot, shoot tip, mature embryo, whole plant) levels (Sivritepe et al., 2008; Cui et al., 2010; Shehab et al., 2010; Patada et al., 2012). Additionally, plant tissue culture techniques also allow opportunities for the researcher to improve plants against abiotic stress factors with the in vitro selection method (Jain, 2001). The purpose of this study is to compile the recent studies about ROS and oxidative stress, how to maintain ROS homeostasis in plants, plant tissue culture, the effects of induced-oxidative stress on antioxidant defense system in plant tissue culture and antioxidant defense systems of in vitro selected-plant against abiotic stresses.

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Oxidative Stress Studies in Plant Tissue Culture