About this Research Topic
Plants are continuously exposed to several abiotic and biotic stresses that negatively affect crop performance and yield. It is predicted that climate change will
enhance the frequency and extent of such negative impacts on crop yield. Continued greenhouse gas emissions will cause further rise in temperature, leading to increased evapotranspiration and drought severity, soil salinity, and local temperature extremes that reduce plants’ capability to defend the attack by insects and pathogenic microorganisms. Thus, multifactorial stresses constitute one of the most pressing threats in agricultural areas worldwide. This has raised a major challenge for plant scientists to secure global food supply and brought an immediate need to continuously increase the yield of major food crops.
Understanding stress-related processes in plants is crucial to develop screening procedures for selecting crop lines that can better adapt to non-optimal conditions. One of the most common strategies used by plant scientists is to identify and characterize genotypes/cultivars with contrasting phenotypes and differential responses to the non-optimal conditions, and find molecular, biochemical and physiological players involved in crop responses to abiotic and biotic stresses. Elucidation of such mechanisms will facilitate identification and further characterization of agronomically important genes, alleles, and molecules for creating/engineering new cultivars to improve crop yield under stress.
We believe that continued communication on this topic among plant scientists is essential for our understanding of crop responses to environmental stress and use of the knowledge in genetic improvement of these crops. Therefore, the aim of this Research Topic is to address the plant molecular and physiological mechanisms induced or suppressed under stressful conditions using crop genotypes/cultivars that have contrasting responses to these stimuli. We welcome researchers worldwide at the frontiers of this field to contribute with innovative research findings and perspectives from different aspects to this collection, including Original Research, Methods, Review, Perspective and thought-provoking Opinion articles on the following topics:
- Contrasting genotypes/cultivars under abiotic stress conditions, including extreme temperatures, drought, salinity, submergence, heavy metals and others.
- Contrasting genotypes/cultivars under biotic stress conditions, including bacteria, fungi, insects and others.
Please note, we encourage studies using at least two genotypes/cultivars in response to stress conditions.
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
