ABSTRACT
Abiotic stress, in simple words, could be referred to as the extreme environmental conditions that affect plant growth and development. These stresses reduce the productivity of major crops by 50 to 70%. Osmoprotectants are low molecular weight, nontoxic, organic compounds that accumulate in plants cells under various abiotic stresses like drought, salinity and extreme temperatures. Late embryogenesis abundant proteins are low molecular weight, hydrophilic proteins that are rich in charged amino acids. These accumulate naturally in embryos during seed desiccation but can also be induced in vegetative tissues during dehydration, cold, salt and abscisic acid treatment. Plant breeding enables the incorporation of stress resistance genes from a tolerant variety into the desired sensitive cultivar through sexual hybridization. Cold stress is often described by chilling injury or freezing injury. These similar-sounding terms are distinct in the sense that chilling injury occurs at above zero temperatures while freezing injury is the damage caused at sub-zero temperatures.
