Dear Colleagues,

As sessile organisms, plants are often subjected to various environmental stress factors. For example, salt stress affects plant growth and development, increases the intracellular osmotic pressure and can cause the accumulation of sodium to toxic levels. Droughts often cause plants to grow short, while strong winds cause plant stems to break, and floods cause plants to logging and wilt, and so on. These environmental factors always occur alternatively, in which the changes in plants’ growing environments largely affect the growth and development of plants and even reduce or destroy the yield of crops in agricultural production. Thus, in response to these stressors, plants must adapt to these environment factors via various mechanisms, including regulating ion homeostasis (mainly salt), activating the osmotic stress pathways (mainly salt and drought), mediating plant hormone signaling (all stressors), and regulating cytoskeleton dynamics and the cell wall composition (all stressors). Moreover, unraveling the mechanisms underlying these physiological and biochemical responses to environmental stressors could provide valuable strategies to improve agricultural crop yields. However, understanding how plants adapt to these adverse environmental abiotic stressors, by unveiling underling the molecular mechanism and mining novel components involved, are still relatively less understood. Therefore, to gain insights into the stress response mechanism of plants, it is meaningful to unravel the perception and transmission links of plants in response to stress stimulations.

This research collection aims to highlight the advances in our understanding of the knowledge of plant adaptation to environmental abiotic stressors, with a main focus on the physiological, cellular and biochemical effects, protein interaction, molecular regulation network as well as on the underlying genetic determination and molecular control (i.e., stress perception, signaling transduction, pathway activation, tolerance/resistance mechanisms). Meanwhile, studies about the mechanisms and functions of epigenetic modifications, gene editing techniques, and accumulation-enhanced adaptation to abiotic stress tolerance are also welcome.

Dr. Dayong Zhang
Dr. Zhaolong Xu
Guest Editors

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• abiotic stresses
• stress tolerance
• adaptation
• stress signaling
• molecular mechanism
• protein interaction
• molecular regulation network