Unlike animals, plants are unable to escape unfavorable conditions, such as extremities of temperature. Among abiotic variables, the temperature is notableas it affects plants from the molecular to the organismal level. Because of global warming, understanding temperature effects on plants is salient today and should be focused not only on rising temperature but also greater variability in temperature that is now besetting the world's natural and agricultural ecosystems. Among the temperature stresses, low-temperature stress is one of the major stresses that limits crop productivity worldwide. Over the years, although substantial progress has been made in understanding low-temperature response mechanisms in plants, the research is more focused on aerial parts of the plants rather than on the root or whole plant, and more efforts have been made in identifying and testing the major regulators of this pathway preferably in the model organism rather than in crop plants. For the low-temperature stress response mechanism, ICE-CBF regulatory pathway turned out to be the solely established pathway, and historically most of the low-temperature research is focused on this single pathway instead of exploring other alternative regulators. In this review, we tried to take an in-depth look at our current understanding of low temperature-mediated plant growth response mechanism and present the recent advancement in cell biological studies that have opened a new horizon for finding promising and potential alternative regulators of the cold stress response pathway.
Keywords: CBF pathway; cell biology; climate change; low temperature; protein trafficking; temperature stress.