This book reviews the current understanding of the molecular control of abiotic stresses and the emerging complexity of regulation and interaction that occurs in plants. Some of the chapters inevitably overlap and cross-link, especially the drought and cold chapters, as these two stresses have molecular control pathways in common; nevertheless they do provide excellent and readable summaries of the current state of knowledge. It is clear from this book that plants adapt to stress in a multi-factorial way, and stress induces huge responses in terms of altered gene expression, which have a metabolic cost to the plant. In drought histidine kinase has been identified as the osmotically activated trigger that cascades the expression of the stress responsive genes, but for temperature the environmental sensing mechanism has yet to be elucidated. Chapters also examine nutrient stresses including aluminium and phosphate and review the potential for improving nitrate use efficiency.

Rather oddly the book concludes with two chapters that are much more general than the rest and maybe the editors should have thought about putting these at the beginning of the text.

Each of the authors of the chapters has done a good job in reviewing the relevant literature and in a field that is constantly moving forward their efforts will be very welcomed by postgraduate students and plant physiology lecturers as excellent current overviews, but it is rather less readable for the other target audiences of agronomists and horticulturalists. Overall this is a reasonable text on genes for abiotic stress resistance suitable for postgraduate students, researchers and academics.