Advances in Adaptation of Plants to Climate Change: Agricultural to Molecular Approaches

Dear Colleagues,

The changes that occur as plants grow influence their life and productivity, which is of great significance to humanity as plants are the most important source of food globally, both directly and indirectly. Additionally, plant growth is very closely linked with a number of climatic factors, namely, patterns of weather, rainfall, and temperature, water availability and contamination, flood and droughts, and salinity. When they find themselves in adverse conditions, growing plants respond through avoidance and/or by adopting strategies at cellular and whole plant level to successfully cope with the changing surrounding climate, which is pivotal to their survival. Such adjustments are made through exploitation of their available resources, i.e., a range of compounds varying from nutrition to inorganic and organic modulators which help plants to both withstand the adverse climate changes and also to maintain productivity, thus meeting the requirements of a burgeoning world population. Plant research employing modulation of agricultural, physiological, and biochemical aspects has mainly been focused on developing a prototype which is suitable for the changing climatic conditions. However, there is need to collect and summarize the advancements made toward achieving the goal of sustainability under changing climatic conditions.

Researchers are welcome to contribute to this Special Issue with their significant contributions (Research articles/Review articles/Methods/ Hypothesis and Theory/Opinions) on, but not limited to, the topics listed below to present state-of-the-art on the subject:

- Climate change—past, present, and future;

- Translation of climate change into changes in temperature, water availability, water and soil contamination, drought, and salinity;

- Physiology/biochemistry and molecular biology of impact of limitation or excess of nutrients, temperature, flood, metals contamination, drought, and salinity on plants;

- Approaches to strengthening plants’ strategies for coping with the impact of limitation or excess of nutrients, temperature, flood, metals contamination, drought, and salinity on plants;

- Role and underlying mechanisms of the compounds/mineral nutrients/hormones/other elicitors in relieving impacts of environmental stresses;

- Hormonal/mineral nutrients/signaling compound crosstalk on climate-change-related stresses in plants;

- Genetics, metabolomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, ionomics, and genome editing strategies to make plant life easier under climate change.

Prof. Dr. Nafees A. Khan
Dr. Naser A. Anjum
Dr. Asim Masood
Guest Editors

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• climate change
• drought
• salinity
• flood
• high/low temperature
• crop/plant responses
• impacts and tolerance mechanisms