Oxidative Stress Studies in Plant Tissue Culture

Higher plants are sessile therefore are continuously exposed to different environmental stress factors, such as drought, salinity, heavy metals, nutritional disorders, radiation without any protection. Most of these stresses produce certain common effects on plants, like induced oxidative stress by overproduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS), besides their own specific effects (Rao, 2006). Thus, plants have developed their own specific response(s) against each of these stresses as well as cross-stress response(s). Investigating these responses is difficult under field conditions, but plant tissue culture techniques are performed under aseptic and controlled environmental conditions. These advantages of plant tissue culture allow various opportunities for researcher to study the unique and complex responses of plants against environmental stresses (Sakthivelu et al., 2008, Lokhande et al., 2011).