| Summary: | Abiotic stress limits seed germination, plant growth, flowering and fruit quality, causing economic decrease. Small Heat Shock Proteins (sHSPs) are chaperons with roles in stress tolerance. Herein, we report the functional characterization of a cytosolic class CI sHSP (OpsHSP18) from <em>Opuntia streptacantha </em>during seed germination in <em>Arabidopsis thaliana</em> transgenic lines subjected to different stress and hormone treatments. The over-expression of the <em>OpsHSP18</em> gene in <em>A. thaliana</em> increased the seed germination rate under salt (NaCl) and osmotic (glucose and mannitol) stress, and in ABA treatments, compared with WT. On the other hand, the over-expression of the <em>OpsHSP18</em> gene enhanced tolerance to salt (150 mM NaCl) and osmotic (274 mM mannitol) stress in <em>Arabidopsis</em> seedlings treated during 14 and 21 days, respectively. These plants showed increased survival rates (52.00 and 73.33%, respectively) with respect to the WT (18.75 and 53.75%, respectively). Thus, our results show that <em>OpsHSP18</em> gene might have an important role in abiotic stress tolerance, in particular in seed germination and survival rate of Arabidopsis plants under unfavorable conditions.
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