Emerging Sustainable and Green Technologies for Improving Agricultural Production

Nowadays, the world is facing food shortages with the increasing global population, decreasing food sources, and deteriorating environment. Traditionally, several strategies have been employed to improve agricultural production, including physical methods (e.g. seed priming, stratification, scarification, and ultrasound) and chemical methods (e.g. disinfectants, fungicides, hormones, and fertilizers). However, most of these methods have their own limitations. For example, some methods require expensive and sophisticated equipment and some approaches are inefficient, time-consuming and impractical. The current agricultural production relies on a large number of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and some other chemicals to guarantee high agricultural output, which inevitably causes environmental pollution and directly threaten human health. Recently, number of emerging sustainable and green technologies, such as atmospheric cold plasma, ion beams, and nanoparticles, are becoming increasingly popular in agriculture, which can be applied in seed sterilization, plant disease control, improvement of seed germination and seedling growth, and enhancement of plant resistance against various stresses. These technologies can be promising alternatives to conventional methods for improving crop yields. However, the mechanisms underline the biological effects induced by the emerging sustainable and green technologies are still unclear.

Therefore, this research topic aims to determine the effectiveness of emerging sustainable and green technologies in microbial inactivation, plant disease control, improvement of seed germination and plant growth, and regulation of plant resistance. The comprehensive physiological, biochemical, and molecular responses of plants response to these technologies, such as uncovering new genes and pathways, analyzing expression patterns, and determining gene functions will be involved in this research topic. In addition, the antimicrobial mechanisms of emerging sustainable and green technologies against plant pathogen will also be included.

In this research topic, we welcome submissions exploring cutting-edge research and recent advances in the application of emerging sustainable and green technologies in the field of plant science or agriculture, such as atmospheric cold plasma used for seed disinfection, ion beams induced hormesis effects in plant cells, and enhancement of plant disease resistance by nanoparticles. It may involve physical, chemical, physiological, biochemical, and molecular biological approaches, focusing on the application of emerging sustainable and green technologies in plant diseases control and regulation of plant growth and stress tolerance. We highly believe that this compilation of high standard scientific papers on emerging sustainable and green technologies will foster discussions within this new field. Authors are invited to submit original research, reviews/mini reviews, methods and opinion articles related to, but not exclusively limited to, for the following topics:

- The application of emerging sustainable and green technologies in regulation of plant growth and stress tolerance.
- The application of emerging sustainable and green technologies in plant disease control.
- The novel pathways of those technologies in regulating plant growth and stress tolerance .
- The antimicrobial mechanisms of emerging sustainable and green technologies against plant pathogen.
- Physiological, biochemical, and molecular studies of plant responses to emerging sustainable and green technologies.