REVIEW article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Crop Biology and Sustainability
This article is part of the Research TopicCrop Responses and Adaptation Strategies Under Global Climate ChangeView all 9 articles
Engineering Resilience in Woody Plants—Multi-Omics, Genome Editing, and Microbiome Strategies to Boost Abiotic Stress Tolerance
Provisionally accepted
- 1Universite Moulay Ismail Faculte des Sciences et Techniques d'Errachidia, Errachidia, Morocco
- 2Universite Mohammed Premier Oujda, Oujda, Morocco
- 3University of Hassan II Casablanca, Casablanca, Morocco
- 4Universite Cadi Ayyad, Marrakesh, Morocco
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Woody plants are critical to human well-being, serving as major sources of biomass and increasingly recognized as promising biofuel resources. They contribute to climate regulation and act as long-term carbon sinks, while also mitigating pollution, flooding, and noise, and providing essential habitats for wildlife. However, recent climatic extremes have underscored the vulnerability of woody species to abiotic stress. In this review, we propose a conceptual framework for stress-adapted woody crops that links physiological responses to resilience biomarkers and outlines strategies to enhance abiotic stress tolerance. We synthesize findings on the sensing structures, physiological networks, and molecular dynamics of woody plants under environmental challenges. Mechanisms of resistance and recovery are examined at both the organismal and cellular levels. We further discuss the integration of genomics, systems biology, and genome-editing technologies to develop climate-resilient woody crops. While many of these emerging tools remain underutilized, their potential is greatly amplified when combined with machine learning-based analyses of genomic data, offering a roadmap for engineering stress-resilient traits and implementing actionable “therapeutic” frameworks. This review highlights recent advances and proposes future directions for improving woody plant performance under abiotic stress.
Keywords: Functional states, metabolic reprogramming, trade-offs, signaling pathway, Stress-adapted woody plants, Woodiness, Plant–microbiome engineering
Received: 21 Jul 2025; Accepted: 05 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ben-Laouane, Abderrahim, Ait-El-Mokhtar and BASLAM. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Marouane BASLAM, mmm.baslam@gmail.com
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