Using Stress Priming and Plant Memory to Develop Climate-Resilient Crops: From Physiology to Genomic Selection

Abstract

Climate change and environmental stresses pose severe, multifaceted risks to global food security and environmental sustainability, and result in the loss of primary productivity and biodiversity that negatively impact the environmental and socio-economic conditions of affected regions. Among other approaches, priming constitutes an easy and relatively cheap strategy due to its potential to enhance germination and stress resilience under changing environments. This review examines an emerging shift in crop improvement, in which environmental stress is no longer viewed solely as a constraint but also as a potential tool for enhancing plant resilience through stress priming and molecular memory. Various priming strategies applied through methods such as hydropriming, osmopriming, hormonal priming, chemical priming, thermopriming, biopriming, and nanopriming, effectively enhance germination performance and stress tolerance through activated defense pathways, osmolyte accumulation, and antioxidant system modulation. Advances in transcriptomics, metabolomics, and proteomics have revealed key markers of the primed state, including gene expression changes, metabolite accumulation, and epigenetic programming, which can provide tools for selection. These markers offer valuable opportunities for identifying and selecting genotypes with enhanced priming responsiveness. Integrating priming technologies with modern breeding strategies, particularly genomic selection, may therefore provide a powerful framework for improving stress adaptation in crops. By combining physiological priming with advanced genomic tools, this approach offers a practical and cost-effective route to accelerate the development of climate-resilient crop varieties and support sustainable agricultural production under increasingly variable environmental conditions.