Delivering Improved Performance Promised with Abiotic Stress Research in Crops: Optimizing Translation to Ensure Uptake and Adoption in the Field

Abiotic stress is a major threat to crops and global food security. Even modest changes in soil water and air temperature can lead to crop yield loss, and these pressures are likely to increase with climate change. Despite decades of research that has intensified in the recent past, the improvements in crop performance needed to mitigate the impact of abiotic stress have been slow and limited to a few crops and regions. Plant responses to abiotic stress are highly complex, as they depend strongly on the stress scenario, environmental context and plant genotypic background, with each of these factors interacting with the others.This complexity has challenged the generation of knowledge that can be translated into improved crop resilience. Difficulty in accurate phenotyping has limited most assessments of trait and genetic value to controlled environments (CE) and to small numbers of genotypes. Confidence in the uptake of new opportunities requires carefully designed methods and collaboration across scales. While recent technological developments in molecular biology, automated phenotyping, computer simulation and machine learning are fueling research advances in this area, other aspects of research methodology — particularly experimental design — have a strong impact on the translatability of results and need renewed examination. Equally, regulatory and physiological mechanisms can behave differently under fluctuating, field-realistic stress than under constant CE stress, and understanding these differences is central to closing the translation gap.The goal of this Research Topic is to gather evidence on the importance of overlooked features of crop abiotic stress study methods, and to highlight innovations — methodological and mechanistic — that support better translation to the field.This Research Topic welcomes:• Primary studies assessing the suitability of current methods of crop abiotic stress research for producing translatable results, including paired CE-to-field comparisons.• Primary studies on the use of novel experimental designs, phenotyping platforms or analytical approaches more likely to generate translatable results than those currently used.• Mechanistic studies that explain why specific traits, genes or regulatory pathways do or do not translate from controlled environments to the field, including signaling, hormonal, metabolic or root-system mechanisms that behave differently under fluctuating versus constant stress.• Reviews on the role of experimental design, phenotyping or reporting practice in generating translatable crop abiotic stress research.• Demonstrated evidence of translation from controlled-environment performance to field performance, and the design choices that enabled it. Topic editors: Anne Plessis, Greg Rebetzke, Hamid Khazaei Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81018/delivering-improved-performance-promised-with-abiotic-stress-research-in-crops-optimizing-translation-to-ensure-uptake-and-adoption-in-the-field