Role of Calcium Regulated Kinases: Expressional and Functional Analysis in Abiotic Stress Signaling

Perception of stimuli and activation of a signaling cascade is an intrinsic characteristic feature of all living organisms. Till date, several signaling pathways have been elucidated that are involved in multiple facets of growth and development of an organism. Exposure to unfavorable stimuli or stress condition activates different signaling cascades in both plants and animal. Being sessile, plants cannot move away from an unfavorable condition, and hence activate the molecular machinery to cope up or adjust against that particular stress condition. In plants, role of calcium as second messenger has been studied in detail in both abiotic and biotic stress signaling. Several calcium sensor proteins such as calmodulin (CaM), calcium dependent protein kinases (CDPK) and calcinuerin B-like (CBL) protein were discovered to play a crucial role in abiotic stress signaling in plants. Unlike CDPK, CBL and CaM are calcium-binding proteins, which do not have any protein kinase enzyme activity and interact with a target protein kinase termed as CBL-interacting protein kinase (CIPK) and CaM kinases respectively. Genome sequence analysis of Arabidopsis and rice has led to the identification of multigene families of these calcium signaling protein kinases. Individual and global gene expression analysis of these protein kinase family members has been analyzed under several developmental and different abiotic stress conditions. Here, we are making an attempt to overview and emphasize the expressional analysis of calcium signaling protein kinases under different abiotic stress and developmental stages, and linking the expression to possible function for these kinases.

Keywords: Calcium, abiotic stress, kinase, CBL, CIPK, CDPK, CaM, signal transduction.