Plant G proteins: Versatile signaling hubs for synergistic improvement of agronomic traits

Breaking the growth-defense trade-off in cereal crops: CRISPR/Cas and moonlighting proteins in biotic stress resistance

Genetic and Molecular Mechanisms of Plant Stress Tolerance and Strategies for Improvement: A Comprehensive Review

Environmental stresses impose a significant threat on plant growth and agricultural productivity. Abiotic stresses, such as drought, salinity, and extreme temperatures, impair plant physiology and development, while biotic stresses, like those caused by pathogens and herbivores, trigger a range of defense responses. Plants have evolved intricate genetic and molecular mechanisms to cope with these challenges. The plant response to stress is governed by transcription factors (TFs), including the AP2/ERF, bZIP, WRKY, and NAC families, which regulate stress responsive gene expression. Phytohormones like ABA, ethylene, and jasmonic acid (JA) serve as crucial signaling molecules that initiate adaptive physiological changes. These signals are transmitted via signal transduction components, such as receptor-like kinases and MAP kinases, which translate external events into cellular responses. Additionally, epigenetic regulation and gene-by-environment (G × E) interactions allow plants to acquire a stress memory and exhibit adaptive plasticity, enhancing their resilience to future challenges. Improving these natural mechanisms is vital for developing stress-tolerant crops. Traditional breeding and modern techniques like Marker-Assisted Selection, Genetic Engineering, Genome Editing and Genomic Selection are used to identify and integrate desirable traits into new crop varieties. These methods enable breeders to develop more robust and stable crops, ultimately helping to ensure global food security in the face of climate change.

Mechanisms of drought tolerance in legumes: physiological impacts, adaptive responses, and phenotyping strategies

A comprehensive analysis of drought-induced effects across various developmental stages in legumes, detailing the signaling networks that facilitate stress perception and response and analyzing the revolutionary role that high-throughput phenotyping could play in stress assessment and precision breeding.

Deciphering the Role of Salicylate and Jasmonate in Crop Protection: Ensuring Future Food Security

Plant hormones orchestrate the defensive capacity of crops against an expanding array of biotic and abiotic constraints that threaten global agricultural output. Among these regulators, salicylic acid and jasmonic acid form the backbone of inducible immunity, directing distinct yet interconnected transcriptional programmes that determine whether a plant survives attack by biotrophic pathogens, necrotrophic fungi, phloem-feeding insects or chewing herbivores. This review synthesises current knowledge on the biosynthesis, perception and signal transduction of salicylate and jasmonate, and examines the molecular basis of their crosstalk, which ranges from mutual antagonism to context-dependent synergy. Particular attention is given to the agronomic exploitation of these pathways through exogenous hormone application, seed priming, defence elicitors and induced systemic resistance, alongside the physiological costs that accompany such interventions, most notably the growth-defence trade-off associated with sustained jasmonate signalling. The review situates this mechanistic understanding within the pressing context of global food security, considering how pest pressure, plant disease and climate-driven abiotic stress converge to erode crop yields, and how hormone-informed breeding and crop management strategies might mitigate these losses. Persistent knowledge gaps are identified concerning field-level translation, crop-specific pathway architecture in monocots relative to the Arabidopsis model, and the reconciliation of defence induction with yield stability. The review concludes that a nuanced, crop-specific understanding of salicylate-jasmonate signalling, rather than a uniform strategy transplanted from model species, will be indispensable for designing resilient cropping systems capable of sustaining production under mounting biotic and climatic pressure.

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.

Systems-Level Integration of Stress Signaling, Multi-Omics, and Predictive Breeding for Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Brassica Crops

By connecting stress biology with translational breeding, this review provides a framework for developing climate-resilient Brassica cultivars by synthesizing recent progress in abiotic stress tolerance from physiological, genetic, epigenetic, and multi-omics perspectives.