LAUSR

Plants being sessile entities are often subjected to varied environmental stresses. They have developed an alternative defense mechanism that involves a vast variety of secondary metabolites to serve as tools to cope up with various stress conditions. The exposure of plant cells to abiotic and biotic stresses initiate multilevel reaction cascades that consequently leads to production and accumulation of various secondary metabolites. Various enzymatic and non-enzymatic molecules comprising the antioxidative defense system comes into play to counteract the undesirable effect of ecological stresses. Energy required as fuel in biosynthesis, transport and storage which comprises the costs for the formation of various transcription factors. When plant experiences stress in combination they express various transcription factors that might help the plant to make flexible signaling cascades to increase plant resistance against one of the stress. Based on this limelight, the present review aims to wrap the influence of different abiotic and biotic factors including salt, drought, heavy metals, UV light, herbivory and pathogenesis on secondary metabolites production and their roles in stress tolerance mechanism in plants.