Plant Antifreeze Proteins and Their Expression Regulatory Mechanism

Low temperature is one of the major limiting environmental factors which constitutes the growth, development, productivity and distribution of plants. Over the past several years, the proteins and genes associated with freezing resistance of plants have been widely studied. The recent progress of domestic and foreign research on plant antifreeze proteins and the identification and characterization of plant antifreeze protein genes, especially on expression regulatory mechanism of plant antifreeze proteins are reviewed in this paper. Finally, some unsolved problems and the trend of research in physiological functions and gene expression regulatory mechanism of plant antifreeze proteins are discussed.