Grafted Vegetables in Sustainable Horticulture: Physiology, Stress Responses, and Innovative Technologies

Vegetable grafting is widely used in crops such as tomato, cucumber, watermelon, melon, eggplant, and pepper to enhance crop resilience and maintain stable productivity under biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Rootstocks can significantly affect water and nutrient uptake, hormonal signaling, photosynthetic activity, root architecture, and sink-source relationships, thereby influencing both vegetative growth and fruit quality. Grafting has become an essential strategy in modern vegetable production systems due to its ability to improve plant vigor, productivity, stress tolerance, nutrient uptake efficiency, and resistance to soil-borne pathogens. Recent advances in protected cultivation, LED lighting technologies, and precision environmental control systems have further created new opportunities to optimize grafted seedling production and improve plant performance under greenhouse and controlled-environment conditions.At the same time, increasing environmental pressures, including salinity, drought, heat stress, and soil degradation, highlight the importance of developing more resilient grafted vegetable systems. The intensification of horticultural production, combined with climate-related abiotic stresses and restrictions on chemical control measures, has accelerated the demand for high-quality grafted seedlings and advanced rootstock technologies. Despite substantial progress in grafting applications, many physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms underlying rootstock-scion interactions remain poorly understood, particularly under controlled-environment and stress-prone cultivation systems. Advances in plant physiology, metabolomics, phenotyping, and molecular biology now provide powerful tools for investigating these mechanisms and developing evidence-based adaptation strategies.This Research Topic aims to bring together recent advances in grafted vegetable research, with a particular focus on rootstock physiology, environmental interactions, and innovative propagation strategies. The collection seeks to improve understanding of how rootstocks influence plant growth, photosynthetic performance, resource allocation, stress adaptation, fruit quality, and productivity across different vegetable crops and cultivation systems. Particular attention will be given to the integration of controlled-environment technologies, including supplemental lighting, precision climate management, and sustainable production approaches, in order to optimize grafted seedling quality and crop performance.This Research Topic welcomes original research articles, reviews, mini-reviews, methods papers, and perspective articles addressing physiological, biochemical, molecular, agronomic, and technological aspects of grafted vegetable production. Contributions focusing on both open-field and controlled-environment cultivation systems are encouraged.Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:• Rootstock-scion interactions in vegetable crops;• Physiological and biochemical responses of grafted vegetables;• Rootstock effects on photosynthesis, carbon allocation, and water relations;• Root architecture and nutrient uptake efficiency;• Grafted seedling quality and propagation technologies;• Supplemental lighting and controlled-environment cultivation of grafted vegetables;• Abiotic stress tolerance (drought, salinity, temperature stress, nutrient imbalance);• Disease resistance and sustainable crop protection strategies;• Fruit yield, quality, and postharvest performance;• Molecular and omics approaches in grafted vegetable research;• Innovative technologies for grafted seedling production and precision horticulture. Topic editors: Kristina Laužikė, Astrit Balliu, Danguole JUSKEVICIENE Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81491/grafted-vegetables-in-sustainable-horticulture-physiology-stress-responses-and-innovative-technologies