Integrating molecular insights with breeding and metabolic engineering approaches facilitates the development of climate-resilient crops adapted to increasingly water-limited environments, supporting global food security and climate adaptation efforts.
Abstract
Drought stress is among the most severe environmental constraints limiting plant growth, productivity and ecosystem stability worldwide. It disrupts cellular homeostasis, impairs photosynthesis, induces oxidative damage and alters metabolite profiles. In response, plants activate coordinated physiological and metabolic responses that reprogram carbon and nitrogen allocation toward protective functions. A major component of this adaptive response is the enhanced production of plant secondary metabolites, which contribute to stress tolerance through integrated biochemical, physiological and ecological mechanisms. This review synthesizes the major classes of drought-responsive secondary metabolites including phenylpropanoids, flavonoids, terpenoids, alkaloids and glucosinolates, and evaluates their biosynthetic pathways, regulatory networks and functional roles in drought adaptation. These metabolites contribute to antioxidant defense, membrane stabilization, osmotic adjustment, lignification and hormonal signaling, maintaining cellular homeostasis under drought stress. Their biosynthesis is coordinated through carbon and nitrogen reallocation via the shikimate, mevalonate, and methylerythritol phosphate pathways, and regulated by transcription factors, abscisic acid signaling and epigenetic modifications. Unlike previous reviews that discuss metabolite classes independently, this review integrates carbon–nitrogen allocation, metabolic trade-offs, regulatory networks and ecological interactions into a systems-level framework for understanding drought adaptation. Therefore, integrating molecular insights with breeding and metabolic engineering approaches facilitates the development of climate-resilient crops adapted to increasingly water-limited environments, supporting global food security and climate adaptation efforts.
Integrating conserved and species dependent mechanisms with crop centered validation will help convert molecular knowledge into breeding, genome editing, and management strategies for saline agriculture.
Muhammad Usman, Li Wang, Xiaojuan An et al.· Plant Science· 0 citations
This comprehensive framework underscores the remarkable capacity of plants to adapt to drought stress through an integrated network of physiological, biochemical, and molecular strategies, holding promise for enhancing crop resilience and agricultural sustainability in water-scarce environments.
Anjali, P. Chand· Progressive Agriculture· 0 citations
Abiotic stress is one of the major constraints limiting crop productivity, plant growth, and fruit quality worldwide. Environmental stresses such as drought, salinity, temperature extremes, heavy metals, and oxidative stress adversely affect plant metabolism, development, and survival.
This review synthesizes published literature on the role of plant secondary metabolites in mediating tolerance to major abiotic stresses. Particular emphasis is placed on the functions of terpenes, phenolic compounds, and nitrogen-containing compounds in plant stress adaptation. Nitrogen-containing compounds have greater effects against biotic stress than abiotic stress.
The reviewed studies indicate that secondary metabolites play significant roles in mitigating abiotic stress. Phenolic compounds, particularly flavonoids and stilbenes, function as powerful antioxidants and photoprotective agents, while terpenes contribute to cellular stability under stress conditions. Nitrogen-containing metabolites, including alkaloids, glucosinolates, and cyanogenic glycosides, also participate in defence responses and stress tolerance. Collectively, these compounds contribute to Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) scavenging, antioxidant activity, osmotic regulation, membrane stability, and stress signalling pathways.
The findings highlight the diverse mechanisms through which secondary metabolites enhance plant resilience to environmental stresses. Their accumulation and activity are critical components of plant adaptive responses and may influence stress tolerance across different crop species and stress conditions.
Secondary metabolites play a crucial role in enhancing plant adaptation to adverse environmental conditions. A better understanding of their mechanisms of action may facilitate the development of stress-resilient crops and support sustainable agricultural production under changing climatic conditions.
U. C., Obadiah A., J. D. et al.· Open Agriculture Journal· 0 citations
This review comprehensively synthesizes recent advances in abiotic stress perception, signal transduction and hormone‐mediated regulation, highlighting their roles in shaping plant stress tolerance and proposes an integrated multi‐scale framework to provide a holistic understanding of drought and salinity stress tolerance and to guide the development of resilient crop systems.
Muhammad Farooq, A. Khan, A. Hassan et al.· Plant Breeding· 1 citation
Biotic stresses (pest feeding, pathogenic fungal/bacterial/viral infection) and diverse abiotic stresses (extreme temperature, drought, waterlogging, saline–alkali soil, heavy metal pollution, nutrient deficiency, UV-B, ozone) severely restrict crop growth and global agricultural yield. Lipids act as core membrane structural constituents and vital secondary signaling messengers, executing multi-layered adaptive balancing functions during cell-type interactive stress acclimation, rather than uniform whole-plant lipid responses. They sustain membrane structural integrity across distinct cell populations, serve as synthetic precursors of bioactive signaling molecules, and trigger cascaded transcriptional and metabolic reprogramming upon environmental stimuli to rebalance physiological status among different cell types. This review systematically summarizes cell-type interactive lipid-mediated plant defense and acclimation balance mechanisms across biotic and abiotic stress contexts. We elaborate the biological functions of fatty acids, phospholipids, galactolipids, sphingolipids and their derivatives (jasmonate, salicylic acid, phosphatidic acid, oxylipin) in stress signal transduction and antioxidant defense and strictly distinguish two categories of lipid changes under all stress types: active adaptive lipid remodeling and passive stress-induced lipid oxidative damage. Key contents include stress-triggered cell-type-specific membrane lipid remodeling, the hierarchical transcriptional regulatory network mediated by WRI1, LEC1, PHR, MADS and other transcription factors governing oil metabolism, as well as crosstalk between lipid metabolism and compartmentalized reactive oxygen species (reactive oxygen species (ROS)) signaling. We further compare conserved lipid-regulatory modules and species-specific divergent responses across model plants and economic oilseed crops, integrating state-of-the-art targeted/untargeted lipidomics, single-cell spatial lipidomics and multi-omics joint breeding strategies to improve multi-stress tolerance in oilseed crops. By consolidating global research progress up to 2025, including the two latest 2026 cross-species meta-analysis reviews, this review provides systematic theoretical support and operable multi-level technical frameworks for genetic engineering targeting conserved lipid pathways to breed stress-resilient high-oil crop germplasm, and highlights reliable lipid stress biomarker screening as a promising translational research direction.
Overall, BRs represent promising targets for improving crop stress resilience; however, optimizing BR-mediated strategies and validating their long-term performance under diverse field conditions will be essential for their successful application in sustainable agriculture.
R. Jan, Shahzad Iqbal, Sajad Ali et al.· Plants· 1 citation
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