Tocopherol: Enhancing Plant Tolerance to Stress

Global climate change has intensified its impact via drought, temperature fluctuations, high-light intensity, salinity, flooding, freezing, and pollution in nearly all areas. On the other hand, biotic stress factors would still carry out their pathogenicity under the changing environmental conditions. The majority of the pathogenic microorganisms can adapt to abiotic stress conditions when compared to most crop plants. The adaptation of pathogens to adverse conditions makes them a potential danger in every situation, and they can be involved in simultaneous or consecutive stresses with those of abiotic stress factors. Due to global climate change, the combined effects of abiotic and biotic stress factors may replace the single stress factors. Developing multiple-stress-tolerant crop plants would still require a bit more time, possibly after revealing the molecular and biochemical pathways of crop plants under multiple stress conditions. Removing stressors from the vicinity of crop plants is almost impossible, and generating stress-resilient plants would take time; however, we could improve the conditions of plants by evaluating and applying beneficial chemicals. Several approaches have been proposed to enhance the conditions of crop plants. One of the key compounds that has been recently proposed to enhance plant tolerance is tocopherol. In this chapter, we evaluated the role of tocopherol and its potential use to enhance plant resistance or tolerance and the possible combination with other compounds for sustainable agriculture under stress conditions.