Plants have evolved a variety of molecular strategies to adapt to environmental stresses. One such strategy involves alternative splicing (AS), in which multiple mRNA variants are created from a single pre-mRNA molecule. A single gene encodes numerous protein products or transcript variants, allowing plants to rapidly adjust the abundance and function of crucial stress-response proteins. AS occurs widely in plants, with studies showing that more than 60% of intron-containing genes undergo the process. Alternatively spliced genes are involved in the plant response to both biotic and abiotic stresses. Plant abiotic stress comprises all non-living factors that affect plants, such as temperature, water, nutrients, and extreme environmental conditions.

Global climate change is bringing new challenges to natural ecosystems around the world. Increasing temperatures and soil salinity levels are contributing to plant abiotic stress, with direct consequences for agricultural crop production. Drought and hyper-salinity are the primary cause of crop loss worldwide. In plants, alternative splicing is of growing importance as more genes are found to undergo AS, which may impact strategies for improving plant phenotypes. More research is needed to understand how alternative splicing modulates plant development and the response to environmental stress. Understanding how AS affects abiotic stress tolerance in crop plants may provide new insights into improving the resilience and productivity of crop plants.

This Research Topic welcomes original research, review, mini-review, and methods papers related to the following areas, but not limited to:

• Molecular mechanism of alternative splicing (AS) in response to abiotic stress such as heat, cold, drought, flood, salinity, etc.
• Identification and characterization of splicing factors and the key spliceosome components that exert plant abiotic stress responses.
• Genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and transcriptomics analyses of AS in response to climate change and abiotic stresses.
• Evolutionary study of AS and RNA splicing regulators in stress responses.
• Approaches to investigate how AS acclimates to environmental changes, such as CRISPR-Cas mediated gene editing in economic plants or machine learning to identify the AS pattern in response to abiotic stresses.

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Frontiers in Plant Science

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