Engineering Plant Stress Signaling Networks for Climate-resilient Agriculture

The field of plant stress biology has become increasingly crucial as climate change drives heightened frequencies and severities of abiotic stresses such as drought, heat, salinity, and flooding, alongside an evolving threat landscape from plant pathogens. Central to plant adaptation are intricate stress-signaling networks that sense and integrate diverse environmental stimuli. These networks, involving phytohormones, reactive oxygen species (ROS), calcium fluxes, mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascades, and downstream transcriptional regulators, orchestrate rapid and coordinated physiological as well as molecular responses. Despite significant advances in understanding the architecture and dynamics of these signaling circuits, natural plant responses rarely suffice to ensure yield stability across the increasingly unpredictable climate scenarios. While recent studies have mapped critical nodes and cross-talk within these pathways, much remains to be uncovered regarding how these networks might be effectively re-engineered to deliver durable, multi-stress tolerance without detrimental effects on plant growth or productivity.This Research Topic aims to uncover and showcase innovative strategies to manipulate plant stress-signaling pathways for the improvement of crop resilience to multiple climate-related stresses. Key objectives include identifying master regulators and feedback mechanisms that underpin robust stress adaptation, deploying genome editing and synthetic biology approaches to optimize signaling outputs, and developing translatable solutions that reliably enhance both stress tolerance and agronomic performance. In doing so, this Research Topic seeks to address major questions regarding how to balance growth-defense trade-offs, integrate insights from natural and engineered stress perception, and harness complementary influences such as plant-microbiome interactions. A core goal is to bridge mechanistic discoveries with field applications, facilitating the transfer of laboratory breakthroughs into agricultural practice.This Research Topic encompasses fundamental and applied studies targeting the dynamic engineering of plant stress signaling under climate change. It is limited to the mechanistic, genetic, and computational dissection, as well as practical manipulation, of stress response networks in crops and model species. To gather further insights in this area, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:• Identification and functional analysis of core stress-signaling components (receptors, kinases, transcription factors)• Hormonal and ROS signaling integration and cross-talk• Epigenetic regulation and memory of plant stress responses• Design and implementation of synthetic signaling circuits• Microbiome-mediated modulation of plant stress signaling• Strategies for multi-stress (abiotic and biotic) tolerance• Trade-offs and optimization between plant growth and defense• Systems biology and predictive modeling of signaling networks• Field validation and translational research for crop improvementWe invite submissions of Original Research articles, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Methods papers, and Perspectives. Interdisciplinary contributions integrating genomics, phenomics, bioinformatics, and biotechnology are particularly encouraged, especially those focused on scalable and field-ready solutions for climate-resilient agriculture Topic editors: Ruchi Agarrwal, MRINALINI MANNA, Mateusz Labudda Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/77834/engineering-plant-stress-signaling-networks-for-climate-resilient-agriculture