About this Research Topic

Background

Descriptive studies that report responses to abiotic stress treatments without contributing to the mechanistic, or genetic, understanding of the responses observed will not be considered for peer review.

Climate change poses a serious threat to agricultural production today and in the future. Changing climatic conditions have increased the frequency of extreme weather events, including heat waves, cold waves, drought stress, altered precipitation, floods, and wildfires. Cereals, the primary element of the staple diet, play an imperative role in human lives and contribute more than 50% of the worldwide caloric intake (primarily rice, wheat, and corn). However, the production of cereal crops is negatively impacted by their sensitivity to climate change-induced abiotic stresses.

In current times, it has become imperative to understand stress-adaptive mechanisms in cereal crops to develop resilient cultivars. One possibility is the exploration of the underlying natural variation in diverse germplasms to identify and characterize the major genetic regulators in these crops. Developing major cereal grain crop varieties that can tolerate varying levels and types of abiotic stress conditions would benefit from such efforts to advance our understanding of the genetics and molecular basis of complex agronomic traits.

It is crucial to understand how cereal crops respond to abiotic stress to develop climate-resilient varieties. Undoubtedly, several omics approaches including genomics, transcriptomics, phenomics, metabolomics, and proteomics have been used to dissect such responses. The big data sets generated by these platforms identified numerous stress-responsive genes. However, a gap exists between data-driven gene identification and their functional validation. An examination of the physiological responses and underlying molecular mechanisms of plants under various abiotic stress conditions is necessary to fill this gap. Even though several studies have functionally validated numerous genes and networks regulating specific quantitative traits under optimum growth conditions. However, the characterization of these genes under unfavorable conditions remains elusive. Hence, efforts need to be directed towards examining the physiological responses of cereal crops to variable abiotic stresses, functionally validating the causal genes, and exploring the underlying molecular responses that could play an important role in mitigating climate change-induced challenges during plant growth.

In this Research Topic, we intend to incorporate contributions from leading plant scientists focusing on understanding numerous abiotic stress tolerance mechanisms in cereal grain crops using several physiological and molecular approaches. The scope of this Research Topic primarily focuses on cereal grains including but not limited to wheat, rice, and maize. The authors are invited to submit original research articles, review articles, methods, and opinion articles related but not strictly limited to the following topics:

- Physiological and molecular responses of cereal grain crops to specific abiotic stress conditions occurring at various growth stages

- Exploring the natural variation for abiotic stress response of the diverse germplasms of cereal grain crops

- Identifying and functionally validating the underlying genetic regulators under unfavorable conditions for complex agronomic traits

- Impact of combined abiotic stress conditions and the underlying plant tolerance mechanisms

- Understanding the plant responses to abiotic stresses from genetic to phenotypic level

- Comparative analysis of different abiotic stress conditions to identify stress-specific responses and signal transduction mechanisms.

- Genetic engineering and biotechnological advances to mitigate the occurrence of abiotic stresses

- Exploring the biochemical pathways having a direct impact on grain yield and quality traits influenced by sub-optimal growth conditions

Keywords: plant genetics, cereal crops, abiotic stress, grain yield

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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