Advances in crop breeding for abiotic stress tolerance

Global climate change such as drought, extreme temperature and adverse soil conditions such as salinity and heavy metal pollution have significantly affected crop yields and quality, thus posing a serious threat to global food security. To better adapt to a variety of abiotic stresses, cereal crops have evolved some fundamental changes in cellular processes and whole-plant physiology. These adaptive responses increasing crop resistance are important for crop improvement. Identifying elite germplasm, revealing the underlying mechanisms and utilizing important resistance genes are of fundamental importance in crop breeding of abiotic stress resistance. Modern techniques such as high-throughput phenotype assessment, whole genome association study, multi-omics analysis and gene editing have facilitated understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying crop abiotic stress responses, and accelerated the breeding of crop abiotic stress resistance.

Although rapid advances in model and non-model plants have greatly improved our knowledge of plant abiotic stress responses, little is known about how cereal crops respond to abiotic stresses. This Research Topic aims to report on crop responses to abiotic stresses such as drought, extreme temperatures, salinity, and heavy metals, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Evaluation of abiotic stress resistance and exploitation of elite germplasm resources
• Identification of genes responsible for abiotic stress resistance using genetic or genomic methods, such as BSA-seq, QTL mapping, GWAS, Genome-wide characterization of important gene families.
• Multi-omics studies on physiological and molecular mechanisms of crop abiotic stress tolerance/resistance.
• Functional analysis of stress-related genes in crops by modern biotechnology
• Breeding strategies for abiotic stress tolerance in crops