Enhancing Plant Resilience and Productivity Through Biostimulants and Advanced Biotechnological Approaches

Environmental stresses, including those driven by climate change, pests, and diseases, severely affect crop growth and productivity, posing significant threats to global food security. Although conventional crop breeding has traditionally been employed to address these challenges, its limitations—such as being time-intensive, laborious, and costly—highlight the need for more efficient solutions. As the global population grows and environmental pressures intensify, developing climate-resilient crops with sustainable yields and improved nutritional value has become critical. This necessitates exploring alternative, more effective approaches to ensure food security in the face of these escalating challenges. Advanced biotechnological approaches offer transformative potential, including the use of biostimulants and cutting-edge molecular techniques such as double-stranded RNA interference, molecular breeding, and genome-editing tools. These innovations enable faster, more precise, and sustainable strategies to enhance plant resilience and productivity, addressing modern agriculture's urgent challenges.

Plant biostimulants play a crucial role in enhancing plant productivity and promoting agricultural sustainability. As green biotechnological agents, plant biostimulants offer promising solutions to improve plant performance under adverse conditions. However, limitations in their field applications highlight the urgent need to bridge the gap between laboratory research and practical implementation.

We welcome submissions of different types of articles (original research papers, perspectives, hypotheses, opinions, reviews, and methods contributing to gene editing and genomics in crop improvements), including, but not limited to:

• Emerging agricultural biotechnologies: current trends and future prospects

• Genome editing techniques for crop enhancement

• Advancements in multi-omics approaches for analyzing biostimulants in crop stress adaptation

• Next-generation biostimulants for enhanced stress tolerance and plant growth

• Molecular mechanisms underlying biostimulant action

Keywords: agriculture, biostimulants, biotechnology, microbial biostimulants, genome editing, non-microbial biostimulants, omics technologies, plant growth

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.