Dehydration-Responsive Element-Binding (DREB) transcription factors: a key to enhancing plant tolerance against abiotic stresses

Climate change is one of the key drivers of evolution. The environment is changing at a faster pace inducing variety of stresses on plants, animals, and microbes. These stresses or adverse stimuli from the environment affect the growth, development, and viability of organisms. Stressors like drought, salinity, heat, cold, and heavy metal poisoning affect plant growth and productivity significantly. Plant has evolved various mechanism to survive under this these abiotic stresses. Recently, the role of transcription factors (TFs), which binds to a short 18-22 nucleotides long DNA molecule, has gained attention. Our study investigates the role and of one of the TFs to improve survivability of plants under drought, salt, heat, cold and heavy metal stressors. This component is known as Dehydration-Responsive Element-Binding (DREB) TFs. These are factors promote or inhibit many stresses inducible genes. DREB indirectly increases the activity of the reactive oxygen species (ROS) that are released by plants in response to stress by interacting with the cis-element of DRE/CRT (dehydration-responsive element/C-repeat) present on the promoter region of the stress-induced genes. Harnessing this can help us in improving the crop productivity, crop quality, and crop viability. This review analyses and summarises the recent advancements of research regarding this versatile motif.