From Signal to Structure: Reactive Species-Driven Adaptation in Plants Under Stress

The field of plant stress biology is gaining urgency as agriculture faces escalating pressures from climate change, resource limitations, and complex environmental stressors. Plants constantly encounter adverse conditions such as drought, salinity, and temperature extremes, alongside pathogen attacks, driving an intense focus on their adaptive responses. At the heart of these adaptations lies the generation of reactive oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur species, which play dual roles as both signals and effectors that trigger biochemical and morpho-physiological modifications. While research has advanced our understanding of individual signaling molecules and anatomical shifts, major gaps persist in integrating these findings across scales—from molecular events to organismal phenotypes. This integration is crucial to deciphering how plants marshal a coordinated, multi-layered response to survive and thrive in changing environments. Despite the expansion of genomics and advanced imaging, more comprehensive frameworks are needed to elucidate the interplay between reactive species, signaling networks, and whole-plant adaptations, particularly as crops are bred or engineered for resilience.

This Research Topic aims to unravel the complex mechanisms by which plants adapt to environmental conditions, with an emphasis on the roles and interactions of reactive oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur species across molecular, anatomical, and physiological domains. It seeks to illuminate how these reactive molecules serve as key signaling intermediaries, linking stress detection to tangible changes in plant structure and function. By leveraging multidisciplinary approaches such as genomics, multi-omics, imaging, and rigorous physiological assessments, the goal is to bridge foundational biological discoveries with practical applications that inform breeding and biotechnological innovation. Ultimately, the objective is to provide new mechanistic insights that facilitate the development of crop varieties with enhanced stress tolerance and improved agricultural sustainability.

Covering investigations from the molecular and cellular to whole-plant scales, this Research Topic intentionally excludes studies unrelated to the interplay of reactive species signaling and morpho-physiological adaptation. To gather further insights in this integrative context, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

- Molecular and cellular mechanisms of reactive species in plant stress signaling
- Stress-induced changes in plant morphology and anatomy
- Functional genomic and multi-omic approaches to elucidate adaptation pathways
- Ecophysiological roles of morphological and physiological plasticity in stress resilience
- Development and application of advanced tools for studying plant responses
-Biotechnological strategies for crop improvement and sustainability in variable environments

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
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• ... View all formats

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Article types

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

• Brief Research Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review

Keywords: Plant stress response mechanisms, reactive oxygen species in plants, plant resilience to environmental stress, morpho-physiological adaptation in crops, plant signaling networks and stress tolerance, nitrogen and sulfur species in plant adaptation, crop improvement for abiotic and biotic stress

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.