The present invention provides compositions and methods for regulating expression of nucleotide sequences in a plant. Compositions comprise a novel nucleic acid sequence for a promoter which is induced by abiotic stress and the coding sequence natively associated with said promoter sequence. A method for expressing a heterologous nucleotide sequence in a plant using said promoter sequence is also provided. The methods comprise transforming a plant cell to contain a heterologous nucleotide sequence operably linked to the promoter of the present invention and regenerating a stably transformed plant from said transformed plant cell.