Aug 2026· Discover Plants· Vol 3· 0 citations· 236 references
Abstract
Abiotic stresses, such as drought, salinity, temperature extremes, heavy metals, and pesticide toxicity, severely impact plant growth and productivity, primarily through the accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and metabolic imbalances. In the era of climate change and declining agricultural sustainability, the development of stress-resilient crops has become essential for ensuring global food and nutritional security. Millets, also known as ‘super grain’ or ‘miracle grain’ due to their nutritional value, are recognized for their inherent resilience and exhibit superior adaptability in arid and semi-arid ecosystems towards these abiotic stresses. It is due to their C4 photosynthetic efficiency, rapid life cycles, and deep root architecture. These cereals deploy integrated morphological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms, including antioxidant defense systems, osmolyte accumulation, stress-responsive gene expression, and hormonal regulation to maintain homeostasis under stress. Despite these traits, millet improvement lags behind that of major cereals due to limited breeding efforts and underdeveloped molecular resources. This review focuses on recent advances in stress tolerance mechanisms, highlighting omics-driven insights, microbial and phytohormonal mitigation strategies, and exploring genome editing and modern breeding tools, such as CRISPR/Cas9 and genome-wide association studies (GWAS), for developing climate-resilient millet cultivars suitable for sustainable agriculture and future food security. The article explores the development of climate-resilient millet varieties by integrating molecular innovations into traditional agronomic practices, which will provide future benefits framework for developing new varieties. Overall, the article will deepen understanding of the molecular processes underlying stress responses and provide targeted solutions to enhance stress tolerance in millets.
Abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, extreme temperatures, flooding, nutrient imbalances, and heavy-metal toxicity are among the most important environmental factors limiting agricultural productivity across the globe. With the ongoing impacts of climate change, these stresses are becoming more frequent, intense, and prolonged, posing a serious challenge to sustainable crop production and global food security. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms that plants employ to cope with abiotic stress and discusses how these stresses affect the four pillars of food security: availability, access, utilisation, and stability. Particular emphasis is placed on key adaptive responses, including stress perception and signalling, hormonal regulation, osmotic adjustment, antioxidant defence mechanisms, and gene-regulatory networks that contribute to stress tolerance. Evidence from major cereal crops reveals that plant sensitivity to stress varies across developmental stages and that the combined effects of multiple stresses are often more damaging than individual stress factors. The review also highlights current and emerging approaches to enhance crop resilience, including conventional and molecular breeding, genome editing, improved agronomic practices, efficient water and nutrient management, soil health restoration, protected cultivation, digital agriculture, and climate-smart farming strategies. Ensuring food security under increasingly unpredictable climatic conditions will require an integrated approach that combines advances in genetics, sustainable crop management, natural resource conservation, socioeconomic support, and equitable access to innovative technologies. Future research should focus on understanding plant responses to multiple simultaneous stresses, improving genotype-by-environment predictions, developing adaptation strategies suitable for smallholder farming systems, and evaluating the effects of stress on crop nutritional quality.
D. Dhore, D. Koche· Asian Journal of Research in...· 0 citations
Climate change represents a major global challenge that threatens agricultural productivity, ecosystem stability, and food security by intensifying abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, and extreme temperatures. Solanaceous crops, which are economically and nutritionally important worldwide, are highly sensitive to these stresses, leading to oxidative damage, impaired photosynthesis, and reduced yield and quality. Nanotechnology has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate these adverse effects. Due to their unique physicochemical properties, nanoparticles (NPs) enhance nutrient uptake, improve water-use efficiency, and regulate plant metabolic processes. They also activate antioxidant defense systems, reduce reactive oxygen species (ROS), and improve the delivery efficiency of growth regulators and bioactive compounds. This review synthesizes recent literature on abiotic stress responses in solanaceous crops and evaluates the role of nanoparticles as mitigation strategies, focusing on physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms. The scope includes drought, salinity, and temperature stresses, as well as nano-enabled applications such as nano-carriers and nano-sensors. Overall, nanoparticle applications improve plant tolerance by enhancing antioxidant activity, regulating stress-responsive pathways, and improving resource-use efficiency, thereby contributing to increased crop productivity under climate change conditions. However, challenges related to nanoparticle toxicity and environmental risks remain, emphasizing the need for optimized and safe application strategies. These findings highlight the potential of nanotechnology as a sustainable tool to enhance the resilience and productivity of solanaceous crops under changing climatic conditions. This review highlights that nanoparticles can enhance abiotic stress tolerance in solanaceous crops by improving antioxidant activity, photosynthesis, nutrient uptake, and water-use efficiency under adverse environmental conditions. Overall, nanotechnology represents a promising strategy for sustainable crop production under climate change, although further studies are needed to ensure its environmental safety and long-term applicability. This review provides a comprehensive overview of abiotic stress effects on solanaceous crops and highlights the role of nanoparticles as a sustainable tool to enhance plant tolerance, productivity, and resilience under climate change conditions.
M. Abou El-Nasr, Karim M. Hassan, Ahmed N. Abdelhamid et al.· Sustainability· 0 citations
Drought stress is a major abiotic factor that severely restricts agriculture productivity, particularly in crops of oilseed, such as Brassica napus L. (B. napus). With the progression of change in climate, the frequency, and severity of drought events are increasing, posing additional challenges to crop production. As a result, enhancing drought tolerance in B. napus has become an important focus of current research. This review synthesizes existing knowledge on the morpho-physiological, biochemical, and molecular response of B. napus to drought stress. It highlights key drought induced changes, including reduction in stomatal conductance, alteration in water use efficiency and photosynthesis performance, and disruption in nutrient uptake. In addition, it discusses the accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and activation of antioxidant defense systems that help plants to cope with the stress conditions. This review further emphasizes the importance of phytohormone signaling, osmotic adjustment, and stress response gene and transcription factors in enhancing plant adaptation to drought conditions. In addition, several agronomic strategies are identified as affective for mitigation drought stress, including optimized sowing practices, exogenous application of PGR and osmolyte, optimized nutrient management, and the use of beneficial microbial inoculants. At the same time, new avenues for developing drought tolerant cultivars through the development in the molecular breeding, such as transgenic approaches, genome editing, and quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping. Recent advances such as CRISPR/Cas9, high throughput sequencing, and contemporary breeding techniques are enhancing the precision and effectiveness of the B. napus crop improvement initiative. CRISPR/Cas9-based genome editing, in particular, enables the focused discovery, validation, and change of drought-responsive genes and regulatory pathways, allowing for precision modulation of drought-adaptive features. Future research should focus on integrating multi osmotic approaches, functional genomics, gene editing, and climate resilient phenotyping to accelerate the development of drought tolerate B. napus cultivars. Bringing together advances in plant physiology, biotechnology, and agronomic management will be essential for achieving this goal. Overall, this review offers useful insights for researchers, breeders, and policymakers working to sustain crop productivity under drought conditions.
M. W. Yonas, Shoaib Zawar, M. Aziz et al.· The Journal of Animal and Pl...· 0 citations
Soil salinization has become a major global abiotic threat restricting sustainable viticulture, especially in coastal and inland saline–alkali zones. Unlike cereal crops mainly suffering from sodium toxicity, grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) is a typical chloride-sensitive woody perennial, subjected to superimposed damages of osmotic stress, ionic imbalance and secondary oxidative injury under saline conditions which severely suppress vegetative growth and degrade berry quality. This review systematically summarizes the multi-layered physiological adaptive mechanisms of grapevine against salt stress, including ion homeostasis maintained by salt overly sensitive (SOS), Na+/H+ exchanger (NHX) and chloride channel (CLC) transporter families, active accumulation of osmoprotectants, synergistic enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidant systems, and phytohormone crosstalk networks formed by endogenous phytohormones (abscisic acid, ABA; jasmonic acid, JA; salicylic acid, SA; brassinosteroid, BR) and small signaling molecules. We further elaborate comprehensive molecular regulatory cascades governing salt tolerance, covering core functional genes for ion transport, master transcription factor families WRKY, MYB, APETALA2/Ethylene Response Factor (AP2/ERF), NAC, basic helix–loop–helix (bHLH) and emerging epigenetic regulatory layers mediated by deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) methylation, microRNAs (miRNAs), long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and circular RNAs (circRNAs). In addition, we integrate four categories of field mitigation strategies for saline vineyards: germplasm improvement via salt-tolerant rootstock grafting, rhizosphere soil basal amendment, exogenous biostimulant regulation, and precision agronomic optimization. Current experimental systems do not fully recapitulate complex field combined-stress conditions, as most studies rely on laboratory single-salt stress simulation. Meanwhile, multi-omics, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) gene editing and high-throughput phenotyping tools provide promising approaches to deepen our understanding of grape salt tolerance. This review constructs a comprehensive theoretical framework linking physiological responses, molecular regulatory networks and practical field technologies, offering systematic theoretical references and technical guidance for salt-tolerant germplasm innovation and environmentally sustainable viticulture on saline soils.
Ting Zheng, Hongying Li, Lingzhu Wei et al.· International Journal of Mol...· 0 citations
Global food security is increasingly threatened by abiotic stresses, particularly waterlogging, which poses significant challenges to cereal crop production. Waterlogging is one of the primary abiotic stresses that significantly influence the interrelationships among plant physiology, growth, and yield. This review aims to examine the relationships among these three aspects in cereal crops, with an emphasis on the response mechanisms to waterlogging stress. Findings from the reviewed literature indicate that waterlogged conditions induce hypoxia in the root zone, leading to reduced photosynthetic rates, impaired nutrient uptake, and increased production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which trigger cellular damage. These effects result in reduced plant growth and yield. Nevertheless, plants exhibit various adaptive mechanisms, such as aerenchyma formation, adventitious root development, and proline accumulation, which enhance tolerance to stress. Variations in tolerance levels among cereal species also influence the extent of yield reduction. Overall, improving plant tolerance to waterlogging stress requires an integrated approach through physiological understanding, genetic improvement, and the application of appropriate agronomic management.
Erlinda Diantini, Hidya Nurlita, Aep Wawan Irwan et al.· Gunung Djati Conference Seri...· 0 citations
Drought is recognized as the primary abiotic stress limiting global crop productivity and poses a significant threat to food security. Consequently, the genetic improvement of drought tolerance has become a priority for modern plant breeding. Developing resilient cultivars requires a fundamental understanding of the physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms that plants employ to counteract water deficits. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of drought-induced effects across various developmental stages in legumes, detailing the signaling networks that facilitate stress perception and response. Furthermore, we evaluate the experimental parameters and methodologies frequently used to assess drought tolerance, weighing their respective advantages and limitations. Finally, we analyze the revolutionary role that high-throughput phenotyping could play in stress assessment and precision breeding.
Andrea Fernández-Gutiérrez, Alvaro F. Rodriguez-Torres, A. Encina et al.· Frontiers in Plant Science· 0 citations
A new method for surgically removing training examples from a model reveals that as datasets grow, the link between what a model learns and what it produces dissolves.
