About this Research Topic

Background

Global climate is changing in an unpredictable manner due to anthropogenic activity in the last 5-6 decades. It is predicted that agricultural crops may face extreme climate change, including an increase in temperature, drought, flood, and rising sea levels that lead to the intrusion of salt on arable land. These abiotic stress factors are the main growth stressors that adversely affect natural resources and sustainable production of crops through various changes in molecular, biochemical, physiological, and morphological parameters. These stress factors pose a serious threat to global food and nutritional security, especially in developing and underdeveloped countries.

In response to abiotic stress, plants have developed specific strategies to survive under different environmental conditions. These strategies are the outcome of evolutionary adaptation in plants to grow in various environmental conditions. The signal for any change in the environment eventually leads to the expression of different genes associated with different stress-related pathways to combat abiotic stress.

In the last several years, researchers have been studying the mechanisms underlying abiotic stress to improve plant tolerance, particularly for crop production in agriculture. Frequent environmental changes have a major influence on the vegetative development of plants from a range of perspectives, leading to molecular, cellular, physiological, and morphological changes. The advent of Omics tools has revolutionized the agriculture field in recent years. For instance, genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics during different abiotic stress conditions have been performed in many agriculturally important crop plants.

This Research Topic will explore the current research towards developing climate-smart crops using modern tools like genome editing and metabolic engineering. Leading plant biologists are encouraged to submit their research that further enhances the understanding of fundamental processes such as stress signaling, and adaption mechanisms that occur in plants in response to varied abiotic stresses. This Research Topic intends to compile the latest updates and unique results on abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, heat, flooding, and heavy metals. Research on other abiotic stresses and climate change in the context of crop management and improvement is also welcome.

The Research Topic welcomes original research, methods, reviews and mini reviews, opinions, and perspectives on the following (but not limited to) themes of interest:

• Plant unique response against abiotic stress involving molecular, biochemical, and physiological mechanisms
• Role of key genes and pathways in providing abiotic stress tolerance
• Genetic approaches for improving crop yield in abiotic stress conditions
• Understanding environmental stress response in plants under changing climate
• Overexpression/loss-of-function studies to characterize the stress responsive gene
• Gene expression and regulation to monitor abiotic stresses
•Transgenic and genome editing approach to improve abiotic stress response
• Stress perception, signal translation and plant response
• Omics and system biology approach to tackle and understand abiotic stress
• Molecular breeding, mutation breeding and genetic engineering for the management of abiotic stress response

Keywords: climate change, abiotic stress, plant mechanisms, adaptation, genome editing

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.

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