Enhancing Crop Resilience to Salt Stress

Salt stress poses a significant challenge to plant growth and crop productivity, especially in arid and semi-arid regions where salinity issues are exacerbated by climate change. This environmental stressor creates ionic and osmotic imbalances, stunting plant growth and leading to decreased water and nutrient uptake, ultimately impacting agricultural output. As climate change intensifies these conditions, developing salt-tolerant crops is becoming increasingly vital.

This Research Topic aims to explore the adaptive mechanisms plants use to cope with salt stress and harness these adaptations through advanced breeding strategies. The focus will be on understanding the physiological, biochemical, and genetic bases of salt tolerance and applying this knowledge to produce resilient crop varieties. By combining classical genetics with modern genomics and high-throughput technologies, researchers can identify and exploit genetic variants and regulatory mechanisms that enhance salt stress tolerance.

To gather further insights into salt stress resilience in plants, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Mechanistic insights into plant responses to salt stress, including molecular, biochemical, and physiological alterations

• Regulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and strategies for managing oxidative stress under salinity

• Exploring signal transduction pathways

• Integrating omics approaches to link genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics with stress tolerance traits

• Mechanisms that explain salt stress mitigation conferred by nanoparticle applications

• Defining and validating salt tolerance criteria, including research on physiological mechanisms and genetic traits that confer salt tolerance in crops, emphasizing growth and productivity

• Functional bases for increased salt tolerance conferred by plant-microorganism associations

• Developing methodologies for engineering salt-tolerant crops, including molecular markers and high-throughput techniques for stress-tolerant plant breeding

This Research Topic seeks to contribute to sustainable agriculture by fostering crops that can thrive under salt stress conditions, ensuring food security amid global climate challenges.

Keywords: salt stress mitigation, salt tolerance criteria, engineering salt-tolerant crops, salt-tolerance functional bases, plant-microorganisms interaction

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.