Plants display a broad capacity range to survive cold and freezing conditions (Thomashow, 1999). Most current work into the molecular basis of plant cold tolerance has been performed in the model non-crop plant Arabidopsis. Increasingly, these observations are being tested in crop plants. The grasses, or Poaceae, contain the economically most important crop plant family members, including all the cereal crops utilized by humans. These include rice (Oryza sativa), maize (Zea mays) and members of the Triticeae, which includes the important members wheat (Triticum aestivuni), barley (Hordeum vulgare) and rye (Secale cereale).
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