Decoding Plant Resilience: Structural Biology Insights into Stress Adaptation

Plant structural biology sits at the leading edge of research on how plants adapt to abiotic and biotic stresses, illuminating the dynamic molecular mechanisms that underlie resilience. It provides powerful tools to reveal how plants sense, transduce, and respond to environmental cues through conformational changes in macromolecules and higher-order assemblies. Stresses such as drought, salinity, heat, pathogen attack, and oxidative imbalance induce precise molecular rearrangements in proteins, membranes, and cellular scaffolds that ultimately determine plant survival and performance.

Recent advances in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, integrative omics, and AI-driven protein structure prediction have transformed our capacity to resolve the dynamic architectures of signaling proteins, transporters, and transcription factors that mediate stress perception and response.

This Research Topic aims to deepen our mechanistic understanding of how molecular structure and interactions drive plant adaptation to diverse stresses. Our primary goal is to integrate structural, molecular, and biological perspectives to uncover novel mechanisms that plants deploy under single or combined stress conditions. Key objectives include: (i) assessing how both predicted and experimentally determined structures inform plant physiology; (ii) dissecting the roles of transcription factors and other regulatory proteins in stress signaling networks; and (iii) promoting studies in which computational predictions are supported by validation in biological systems. Together, these efforts will help build a more unified and actionable framework for translating molecular insights into crop improvement.

The scope of this Research Topic encompasses multidisciplinary approaches that link molecular structure to biological function in plant stress adaptation, with an explicit requirement for biological context or validation of in-silico models. We welcome submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Mechanistic studies of transcription factors and regulatory proteins involved in plant stress responses
• Molecular dynamics and structural simulations that reveal conformational mechanisms underlying plant stress signaling and tolerance
• Structure–function relationships in ion channels, transporters, transcription factors, and receptors mediating stress perception and signal transduction
• Structural remodeling of plant cells and tissues under stress conditions, including the roles of cellular and protein scaffolds (e.g., chaperones)
• Cryo-EM, X-ray crystallography, and NMR studies elucidating macromolecular complexes central to stress adaptation
• Integrative omics and advanced protein structure prediction approaches for insights into plant resilience
• Translational and simulation-based research connecting molecular models to physiological and agronomic outcomes

We encourage submissions of original research articles, methods, reviews, opinions, and perspectives that couple molecular or structural insights with clear biological validation.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: plant resilience, plant stress adaptation, structural biology, abiotic stress, biotic stress, crop improvement, molecular dynamics, plant transcription factors, MYB family, cell remodeling, protein structure prediction, integrative omics, plant science, environmental resilience, physicochemical modulation, translational approaches, stress adaptation mechanisms, structural regulatory proteins, epigenetic changes in plants, multifactorial stress, climate change adaptation, molecular simulations, plant form and function, cell structural remodeling, advanced protein imaging, plant genetics, plant molecular biology

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.