Plant sugars: Homeostasis and transport under abiotic stress in plants

Abstract

The sessile nature of plants' life is endowed with a highly evolved defense system to adapt and survive under environmental extremes. To combat such stresses, plants have developed complex and well‐coordinated molecular and metabolic networks encompassing genes, metabolites, and acclimation responses. These modulate growth, photosynthesis, osmotic maintenance, and carbohydrate homeostasis. Under a given stress condition, sugars act as key players in stress perception, signaling, and are a regulatory hub for stress‐mediated gene expression ensuring responses of osmotic adjustment, scavenging of reactive oxygen species, and maintaining the cellular energy status through carbon partitioning. Several sugar transporters are known to regulate carbohydrate partitioning and key signal transduction steps involved in the perception of biotic and abiotic stresses. Sugar transporters such as SUGARS WILL EVENTUALLY BE EXPORTED TRANSPORTER (SWEETs), SUCROSE TRANSPORTERS (SUTs), and MONOSACCHARIDE TRANSPORTERS (MSTs) are involved in sugar loading and unloading as well as long‐distance transport (source to sink) besides orchestrating oxidative and osmotic stress tolerance. It is thus necessary to understand the structure–function relationship of these sugar transporters to fine‐tune the abiotic stress‐modulated responses. Advances in genomics have unraveled many sugars signaling components playing a key role in cross‐talk in abiotic stress pathways. An integrated omics approach may aid in the identification and characterization of sugar transporters that could become targets for developing stress tolerance plants to mitigate climate change effects and improve crop yield. In this review, we have presented an up‐to‐date analysis of the sugar homeostasis under abiotic stresses as well as describe the structure and functions of sugar transporters under abiotic stresses.