Crop Resilience to Combined Drought and Salinity Stress in Drylands: From Soil Processes to Genomic Solutions.

Crop Adaptation to Combined Abiotic Stresses: Mechanisms and Microbial Partners (Review)

This review systematizes current knowledge on the types of CAS, their interactions, and their impacts on plant physiological, molecular, and microbiological processes, and extrapolates from established mechanisms to propose how microbes may mitigate combined stresses.

Trichoderma-Enabled Crop Resilience Under Abiotic Stress: From Field Delivery to Systems-Level Stress Reprogramming

The synthesis shows that selected crop–strain systems improve root architecture, photosynthesis, antioxidant regulation, osmotic adjustment, nutrient acquisition, ion homeostasis, hormonal balance, and stress-responsive gene expression, and biochar co-application should not be interpreted as a carrier formulation without direct validation.

Wheat microbiome interactions under climate change: Mechanisms of abiotic stress tolerance and sustainable crop resilience.

Climate change-induced stresses, including drought, heat, and salinity, are increasingly constraining wheat productivity globally and pose a significant threat to global food security. Although beneficial rhizosphere microorganisms are known to enhance wheat stress tolerance, the mechanisms underlying wheat-microbiome interactions under climate-stress conditions remain poorly understood. This review highlights that wheat actively recruits and reshapes stress-resilient microbial communities, particularly members of Bacillus and Pseudomonas, which promote stress adaptation by regulating reactive oxygen species (ROS), phytohormone homeostasis, nutrient acquisition, and stress-responsive signalling pathways. Furthermore, wheat domestication has altered plant-microbe interactions, resulting in substantial differences in microbiome composition and functional potential between modern cultivars and their wild relatives. The wheat rhizosphere is a dynamic ecological interface where roots interact with diverse microbial communities that influence plant growth, nutrient cycling, and resilience to environmental stresses. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the effects of climate change on wheat physiology, growth, and rhizosphere microbiome composition, while examining how soil physicochemical properties shape microbial assembly and function. Particular emphasis is placed on the mechanisms by which beneficial microorganisms alleviate abiotic stress, including modification of root system architecture, antioxidant regulation, indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) production, osmolyte accumulation, nutrient mobilization, and mitigation of stress-induced ethylene through ACC deaminase activity. We also discuss plant-microbe communication networks mediated by root exudates, microbial signalling molecules, and hormonal crosstalk that govern microbial recruitment, colonization, and establishment within the rhizosphere. Recent advances in genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and integrated multi-omics approaches have revealed that wheat dynamically restructures its microbiome in response to environmental stress, with host genotype serving as a key determinant of microbial community composition and function. By integrating evidence on soil properties, microbial functional traits, rhizosphere community dynamics, and wheat stress adaptation, this review provides a comprehensive framework for understanding microbiome-mediated stress resilience. Despite considerable progress, significant knowledge gaps remain regarding microbial community stability, functional redundancy, and the long-term field performance of microbial consortia across locations, seasons, and combined stress scenarios. Addressing these challenges through the integration of multi-omics technologies, microbiome-assisted breeding, synthetic microbial consortia, and climate-smart management strategies will be essential for developing resilient and sustainable wheat production systems under changing climatic conditions.

Abiotic Stress, Crop Resilience and Food Security: A Comprehensive Review

Abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, extreme temperatures, flooding, nutrient imbalances, and heavy-metal toxicity are among the most important environmental factors limiting agricultural productivity across the globe. With the ongoing impacts of climate change, these stresses are becoming more frequent, intense, and prolonged, posing a serious challenge to sustainable crop production and global food security. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms that plants employ to cope with abiotic stress and discusses how these stresses affect the four pillars of food security: availability, access, utilisation, and stability. Particular emphasis is placed on key adaptive responses, including stress perception and signalling, hormonal regulation, osmotic adjustment, antioxidant defence mechanisms, and gene-regulatory networks that contribute to stress tolerance. Evidence from major cereal crops reveals that plant sensitivity to stress varies across developmental stages and that the combined effects of multiple stresses are often more damaging than individual stress factors. The review also highlights current and emerging approaches to enhance crop resilience, including conventional and molecular breeding, genome editing, improved agronomic practices, efficient water and nutrient management, soil health restoration, protected cultivation, digital agriculture, and climate-smart farming strategies. Ensuring food security under increasingly unpredictable climatic conditions will require an integrated approach that combines advances in genetics, sustainable crop management, natural resource conservation, socioeconomic support, and equitable access to innovative technologies. Future research should focus on understanding plant responses to multiple simultaneous stresses, improving genotype-by-environment predictions, developing adaptation strategies suitable for smallholder farming systems, and evaluating the effects of stress on crop nutritional quality.

Integrated Drought Resilience in Foxtail Millet: From Molecular Regulation and Multi-Omics to Climate-Resilient Breeding

This review constructs an explicit conceptual framework integrating cross-scale defense mechanisms—mechanistically linking molecular signal transduction and post-transcriptional regulation to cellular homeostasis and field-scale yield stability—and spotlight the emerging integration of machine learning-assisted breeding and genomic prediction for the efficient evaluation of superior germplasms.

Emerging molecules for drought resilience in plants