Biotechnological Engineering of Cellular Barriers and Transport Pathways for Improved Crop Tolerance to Soil-Borne Stresses

Soil-borne environmental threats, including abiotic stresses such as salinity and drought, and biotic stresses such as pathogens and parasitic plants, are major constraints on crop productivity and global food security. Addressing these challenges requires a deeper understanding of how plants regulate physical barriers and transport connectivity across tissues and organs. This Research Topic will feature innovative biotechnological approaches to dissect and modify these mechanisms throughout the plant body. Using genome editing, synthetic biology, and cell-type-specific regulation, such work can enable crops that better withstand soil-borne stresses while optimizing resource allocation. The collection will emphasize how targeted modification of tissue barriers and transport pathways can enhance whole-plant tolerance and improve crop performance in suboptimal environments.The root system is the plant’s first line of defense against the dynamic and often hostile soil environment. Plants cope with these challenges through coordinated structural and physiological mechanisms, including physical barriers that exclude or contain stressors and transport pathways that regulate the movement of water, ions, and other molecules. Barriers such as the Casparian strip and the suberization and lignification of the endodermis and exodermis reduce the apoplastic spread of pathogens, limit toxic ion entry, and reduce water loss back to the soil. These barriers also redirect transport through symplastic and transcellular pathways, enabling selective uptake, intracellular compartmentalization, and tighter regulation of vascular loading and unloading toward aboveground tissues. In the shoot, Casparian strip-like structures in the bundle sheath and lignified cell walls, plasmodesmatal regulation, and vascular transport shape the distribution of water, ions, and pathogens. Understanding and engineering these mechanisms across the root-to-shoot axis is essential for developing crops with improved tolerance to soil-borne stresses.This Research Topic invites submissions that focus on practical applications for improving agronomic traits and employ advanced biotechnology approaches, including CRISPR, synthetic biology, cell-type-specific manipulation, and molecular breeding, to engineer physical barriers and transport connectivity under biotic, abiotic, or combined soil-borne stresses. Purely descriptive or exploratory studies are outside the main scope of our focus.We welcome Original Research, Review, Mini-Review, and Perspective articles addressing:• Genetic or metabolic modification of apoplastic and hydrophobic barriers to restrict the spread of pathogens, parasitic plants, or toxic ions across plant tissues.• Regulation of symplastic and vascular connectivity, including plasmodesmata permeability, callose kinetics, and xylem/phloem loading and unloading dynamics under single or combined stresses.• Cell-layer- and tissue-specific manipulation of transporters to optimize whole-plant resource allocation and limit stress-induced cellular damage.• Using tissue-specific or stress-inducible promoters to cause localized structural changes, separating defense mechanisms from growth-related trade-offs that reduce yield. Topic editors: Lidor Shaar-Moshe, Maryam Rahmati Ishka, Ph.D. Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82439/biotechnological-engineering-of-cellular-barriers-and-transport-pathways-for-improved-crop-tolerance-to-soil-borne-stresses