Ion transporters and their exploration for conferring abiotic stress tolerance in plants

Ion transporters are essential for plant growth and development, and play key roles not only in acquisition/ transportation of essential ions from the surrounding and within the plant but also in boosting and regulating the important cellular and physiological processes like signaling, protection from attacks, keeping osmotic homeostasis and conferring stress adaptations. Being sessile in nature, plants frequently face climatic changes and challenging environmental conditions, which significantly hamper their growth, development and crop yields. These transporters have been studied for their role in metabolic-molecular pathways that are used by plants to confer tolerance for such abiotic stresses. This review highlights the current understanding and developments and futuristic perspectives on major plant ion transporters and families, their importance in plants, especially in sensing and adaptive mechanisms against abiotic stresses. Current approaches used to identify and characterize ion transporters including computational tools in constructing signaling networks, for improving our understanding of the behavior of transporters under abiotic stress, have been presented. A perspective discussion has been presented on potential exploration of plant ion-transporters for engineering abiotic stress tolerance in crops via important approaches like transcriptional activators-like effectors, microRNAs, marker assisted breeding and CRISPR-Cas9 based genome editing for ensuring sustainable crop production. The current review holds significance and novelty and provides the reader a comprehensive and updated account on major ion transporters in plants, their roles and tools currently in use for their characterization and their exploration for engineering crops for improved abiotic stress tolerance.