Genetic Resilience in Cereals Under Climatic Stress

Climate change poses an escalating threat to global cereal production, with rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and intensifying heat events already compromising crop yield, quality, and nutritional value. Cereals such as wheat, rice, maize, and barley form the backbone of global food security, making their physiological and genetic resilience to climatic stress a critical research priority. Understanding how cereals perceive, respond to, and recover from heat and related climatic stresses — and how these responses shape yield and grain quality — is essential for safeguarding future harvests.This Research Topic explores the physiological, biochemical, and genetic innovations that underpin heat tolerance and nutritional quality in cereals under a changing climate. It brings together research on stress physiology, metabolic and developmental responses to heat, and the genetic pathways and markers associated with resilience, with the goal of understanding how these mechanisms jointly determine yield stability and grain quality under adverse climatic conditions. Particular attention is given to studies that connect physiological performance with underlying genetic and molecular drivers, as well as their translation into sustainable cultivation practices.We welcome contributions spanning crop physiology, molecular genetics, agronomy, and applied breeding, with an emphasis on studies offering mechanistic and translational insight for climate-resilient cereal production.We invite Original Research, Reviews, Mini Reviews, and Perspective articles covering, but not limited to, the following themes:- Physiological and biochemical mechanisms underlying heat and climatic stress responses in cereals- Impact of heat stress on grain yield, developmental processes, and nutritional composition- Metabolic and hormonal regulation of stress tolerance in cereal crops- Genetic markers and QTLs associated with heat tolerance and resilience- Genomic and transcriptomic approaches to identifying stress-resilience pathways- Genotype-by-environment interactions under variable climatic conditions- Climate-adaptive agronomic and cultivation practices for cereal crops- Breeding strategies and marker-assisted selection supporting climate resilience- Gene editing and biotechnological approaches to improving stress tolerance- Integrating physiological and genetic resilience research with food security and sustainability goals Topic editors: Rodrigo Iván Contreras-Soto, Freddy Mora-Poblete, JACOB MASHILO Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86515/genetic-resilience-in-cereals-under-climatic-stress