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

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

A unified framework that merges mechanistic discovery, microbiome-assisted breeding, soil and water management and systems-level predictive modelling is proposed, essential for developing climate-resilient crops to sustain dryland agriculture.

Plant–microbe interactions as drivers of sustainable agriculture: molecular mechanisms, stress mitigation, and future prospects

Plant–microbe interaction is an essential component of sustainable agriculture which promotes plant growth, improves nutrient assimilation, and enhances plant resistance to various environmental stress conditions. Beneficial microbes, such as rhizobacteria, mycorrhizal fungi, and endophytes, boost plant functions using molecular signaling, phytohormone modification, systemic resistance induction, and pathogen antagonism. The use of new multi-omics techniques has uncovered complicated communication systems mediated by root exudates, recognition via receptors and microbial community functioning. In this review, the current understanding of the molecular basis of plant–microbe associations and their roles in combating drought, salinity, temperature, and heavy metals stresses is summarized. Special attention is paid to the promising approach based on microbiome engineering, synthetic communities and next generation biofertilizers for climate-smart agriculture. The main difficulties associated with environmental fluctuations, host specificity, inconsistency at field scale, and the lack of omics and bioinoculant validation guidelines are also highlighted.

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.

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.

Mechanisms of Plant-Associated Microbial Community Regulation of Plant Drought Resistance under Drought Stress

Microbial volatile compounds enhance drought resilience and productivity in CAM and C3 crops.

Plants interact with their associated microbiota through diverse chemical cues, including microbial volatile organic compounds (mVOCs) that act as airborne signals that modulate plant physiology and stress resilience. This is particularly relevant under drought, a major constraint on global plant productivity. Although short-term physiological responses to microbial volatiles have been widely documented, their longer-term effects on functional plant traits and performance remain poorly understood, especially in species with contrasting photosynthetic strategies and water-use characteristics. We investigated the effects of selected mVOCs-camphene (CAMP), ethyl isovalerate (EV), their combination (EV + CAMP), and nonanal-in Agave tequilana and Solanum lycopersicum cv. Micro-Tom (tomato), representing CAM and C3 species, respectively. Agave and tomato seedlings were exposed once to volatiles and then grown for eight and four and a half months, respectively, under defined water-limiting regimes. In Agave, we evaluated four groups of traits: leaf and biomass, roots, pigments and sugars and proline; whereas in tomato, we assessed growth and yield. EV followed by CAMP enhanced A. tequilana performance under moderate and severe water limitation, promoting leaf and root development, increased relative water content, as well as higher carbohydrates and chlorophyll levels. In tomato, volatile exposure increased fruit yield from 0.10 to 2.65-fold under both well-watered and moderate drought, with EV exerting the strongest effect under moderate drought. Nonanal yielded net negative effects on agaves, while the mix EV + CAMP showed positive effects on tomato, but poor results on A. tequilana. Our results demonstrate that EV and CAMP, alone or in combination, act as biologically active airborne signals that modulate plant physiological plasticity under water limitation. Remarkably, a single volatile exposure produced lasting effects on vegetative and reproductive development, highlighting their potential as sustainable tools to enhance drought resilience and crop productivity.