Role of Brassinosteroids in plants responses to salinity stress: A review

Brassinosteroid emerges as an essential phytohormone that helps the plant to maintain plant growth and development. It also helps the plants grow well under adverse conditions along with normal conditions. In this review article, we have discussed the functional role of brassinosteroid (BRS) in plants under salinity stress conditions. Salinity stress is one of the most devastating abiotic stresses which adversely affect plant growth by disturbing their metabolic pathway. This article also comprises the occurrence, structure and signalling pathway of the brassinosteroid. Application of brassinosteroid improves the plant status under salinity by enhancing the antioxidant enzyme activity in plants. Moreover, we also reported the different growth parameters enhanced by brassinosteroid application in plants under salinity. BRSs also maintain plant growth through the regulation of expression of various genes whose products are involved in various biochemical and physiological processes. This review is based on the various aspects in much detail which are required to understand the proper mechanism of BRS, such as i) the role of BRS signaling pathways in providing tolerance to the plants, ii) changes due to the presence or absence of BRS in plants under stress conditions, iii) BRSs application on the regulation of different genes and transcriptional factor, iv) regulation in ion homeostasis, v) reduction of oxidative stress via different mechanisms under salinity stress. However, a lot of knowledge is required to understand the role of BRS in alleviating salinity stress and needs future research work on BRS with its different derivatives in the alleviation of salt stress.