This Research Topic aims at accelerating the discovery of crop varieties that are able to withstand environmental stresses, via the use of phenotyping approaches at the plant and cellular levels.

Climate change is expected to have a drastic impact on agriculture, notably by impacting water availability, precipitations, temperatures, soil nutrients, and the incidence of diseases and pests. A better use of plant genetic resources and plant breeding are key to tackling this challenge from climate change and for food security. Many landraces and wild relatives of crops are conserved in seed and gene banks. These collections are potentially valuable for breeders, but are presently underexploited. Moreover, the contribution of the soil microbiome to enhance the performance of specific plant genotypes has been overlooked. The aim is to generate crops that are resistant against biotic stress or can tolerate abiotic stress without significant impact on their performance.
Current studies in the field of sensor technologies and phenomics are mainly empirically based and do not link the phenotypic parameters to the molecular scale. Similarly, many molecular studies do not correlate their findings to the whole plant phenotype. The quantitative high throughput analysis of crop potential and behavior during stress is a form of Genotype x Environment interaction and is a major bottleneck. We urgently need to identify resilient genotypes and to understand the underlying mechanisms of this resilience. Phenotyping science is quickly developing to characterize plant behavior, it's dynamic dimensions, and to quantify features such as growth and stress resilience, which increasingly permit to link the phenotype to genetic control.

This Research Topic arises from the COST FA1306 Action 'The quest for tolerant varieties: phenotyping at plant and cell level'. We welcome Review, Opinion, and Original Research articles from the various Working Group participants, but also spontaneous contributions addressing the applications of phenotyping at the plant or cellular levels to (re)discover tolerant/resistant crop varieties and to understand tolerance/resistance.

Keywords: phenotyping, resistance, tolerance

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.