The Role of Ethylene in Plants Under Salinity Stress

Jian-Jun Tao, Hao-Wei Chen, Biao Ma, Wan-Ke Zhang, Shou-Yi Chen, Jin-Song Zhang

Although the roles of ethylene in plant response to salinity and other stresses have been extensively studied, there are still some obscure points left to be clarified. Generally, in Arabidopsis and many other terrestrial plants, ethylene signaling is indispensable for plant rapid response and tolerance to salinity stress. However, a few studies showed that functional knock-out of some ACSs increased plant salinity-tolerance, while overexpression of them caused more sensitivity. This seems to be contradictory to the known opinion that ethylene plays positive roles in salinity response. Differently, ethylene in rice may play negative roles in regulating seedling tolerance to salinity. The main positive ethylene signaling components MHZ7/OsEIN2, MHZ6/OsEIL1, and OsEIL2 all negatively regulate the salinity-tolerance of rice seedlings. Recently, several different research groups all proposed a negative feedback mechanism of coordinating plant growth and ethylene response, in which several ethylene-inducible proteins (including NtTCTP, NEIP2 in tobacco, AtSAUR76/77/78, and AtARGOS) act as inhibitors of ethylene response but activators of plant growth. Therefore, in addition to a summary of the general roles of ethylene biosynthesis and signaling in salinity response, this review mainly focused on discussing (i) the discrepancies between ethylene biosynthesis and signaling in salinity response, (ii) the divergence between rice and Arabidopsis in regulation of salinity response by ethylene, and (iii) the possible negative feedback mechanism of coordinating plant growth and salinity response by ethylene.