Biostimulants as Modulators of Crop Homeostasis: Priming, Balance, and Recovery under Abiotic Stress

Crop plants operate under continuous environmental pressure, facing fluctuating conditions that include drought, salinity, temperature extremes, and nutrient limitation. These stresses do not simply suppress growth, they reshape the entire physiological economy of the crop, altering source-sink dynamics, water and nutrient use efficiency, assimilate partitioning, and ultimately the yield and quality of harvestable products. Understanding how crops maintain, lose, and restore physiological function across a stress event is therefore central to crop physiology and to the design of effective agronomic interventions.Biostimulants have attracted increasing attention as tools to support crop performance under abiotic stress. Yet most research to date has evaluated their effects at a single point in time or in relation to final yield metrics, treating stress tolerance as a fixed outcome rather than a dynamic physiological process. This framing misses the regulatory reality: crops move through distinct physiological phases when exposed to stress, sustaining internal equilibrium under pressure, and then reallocating resources to rebuild growth capacity once stress is relieved. Biostimulants may act differently, and with different agronomic consequences, depending on which phase they target.This Research Topic proposes a crop physiology-centered framework for biostimulant research, organized around three interconnected phases: stress priming and physiological preparedness; in-stress maintenance of homeostatic balance including water relations, nutrient assimilation, and carbon allocation; and post-stress recovery of vegetative and reproductive growth, product formation, and yield quality. The focus is on whole-plant and crop-level responses rather than on cellular or molecular pathway dissection, reflecting the integrative nature of crop physiology and the practical need to understand how biostimulant effects translate across scales from tissue function to field performance.This Research Topic therefore invites contributions that advance our understanding of biostimulant-mediated crop resilience as a dynamic physiological process with direct relevance to agronomic practice and crop productivity.We welcome original research articles, reviews, short communications, and methodological reports addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:• Biostimulant-induced physiological preparedness and stress priming at the whole-plant and crop level;• Maintenance of water relations, nutrient assimilation, and carbon allocation under sustained abiotic stress;• Source-sink dynamics and assimilate partitioning in biostimulant-treated crops during and after stress;• Post-stress recovery of vegetative growth, reproductive development, and yield formation;• Effects of biostimulants on harvestable product quality, including nutritional composition and marketable yield, under stress conditions;•Time-resolved physiological assessments of biostimulant efficacy across distinct stress phases;• Comparative performance of biostimulant strategies across crop species, growth stages, and stress combinations;• Agronomic translation of biostimulant-mediated resilience from controlled experiments to field-relevant conditions.Dr. Colla Topic is the co-owner of a spin off Company Arcadia dealing in plant biostimulants. The other Topic Editors report no competing interests related to this Research Topic. Topic editors: Jun-Yi Yang, Giulia Franzoni, Chi-Te Liu, Giuseppe Colla Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82018/biostimulants-as-modulators-of-crop-homeostasis-priming-balance-and-recovery-under-abiotic-stress