Transcriptional Regulation of Biotic and Abiotic Stress Responses: Challenges and Potential Mechanism for Stress Tolerance and Chickpea Improvement

The abiotic stress factors associated with climate change frequently enhance the severity of plant diseases, which have a detrimental impact on the growth and productivity of the various crops including legumes. After common beans, the chickpea (Cicer spp.) is the second most cultivated legume crop all over the world. They are susceptible to decreased productivity caused by the detrimental effects of several fungal and bacterial infections, which are regulated by environmental conditions. To understand crop growth, it is crucial to study how plants respond to infections in the presence/fluctuations of abiotic factors. However, to cope with these environmental changes, plants have developed a variety of specific signaling mechanisms for intracellular communications, leading to the initiation of complex defense systems of signal perception and signal transduction to induce/enhance defense responses. Various transcription factors (TFs), along with their cofactors and cis-regulatory elements, play a crucial role in plant defense mechanisms. Transcriptional control by TFs has a vital role in building plant defense mechanisms and related activities in response to viral and bacterial infections. However, the molecular mechanisms including the role of transcription factors (TFs) behind environmental cues are still little understood in chickpea. Therefore, the objective of this review is to outline the potential functions of key stress-responsive transcription factors (TFs), such as WRKY, bHLH, bZIP, AP2/ERF, and MYB gene families, in regulating defense-related genes and facilitating communication across the network of stress-responses during adverse conditions. Furthermore, understanding the function of transcription factors (TFs) could be advantageous in enhancing crop tolerance to develop stress-resistant chickpea cultivars utilizing advanced biotechnological techniques.