Crop Stress Tolerance: From Molecular Mechanisms to Agronomic Performance

A special issue of Agronomy (ISSN 2073-4395). This special issue belongs to the section "Agroecology Innovation: Achieving System Resilience".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 January 2027 | Viewed by 130

Editor

College of Forestry, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Shangxia Dian Road 15, Fuzhou 350002, China
Interests: crop ecophysiology; plant stress physiology; abiotic stress; climate change
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Crop production is increasingly challenged by diverse abiotic and biotic stresses, including drought, salinity, heat, nutrient imbalance, pathogens, and pests. Improving crop stress tolerance has therefore become a major priority for sustaining agricultural productivity, resource-use efficiency, and food security under changing environments. Recent advances in plant physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and omics-based approaches have greatly expanded our understanding of the mechanisms underlying crop adaptation and resistance to stress. At the same time, there is a growing need to connect these mechanistic insights with agronomic traits, field performance, and practical crop improvement strategies.

This Special Issue aims to highlight recent progress in the study of crop stress tolerance, with particular emphasis on the integration of physiological processes, genetic regulation, molecular signaling, and agronomic performance. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, stress perception and signaling pathways, stress-responsive genes and regulatory networks, phytohormone-mediated responses, redox regulation, source–sink relations, and the use of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and phenotyping tools to identify key mechanisms and targets for crop improvement. Studies addressing the translation of laboratory findings into breeding, cultivation, and stress-management practices are especially welcome.

We invite the submission of original research articles, reviews, and short communications related to the mechanisms, regulation, and agronomic implications of crop responses to abiotic and biotic stresses. This Special Issue seeks to provide a focused platform for advancing both fundamental understanding and applied strategies to enhance crop resilience and agricultural sustainability.

Dr. Liang Fang
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • stress signaling
  • stress-responsive genes
  • regulatory networks
  • phytohormones
  • redox homeostasis
  • omics and phenotyping
  • crop improvement

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Review

22 pages, 1229 KB  
Review
Circadian Clocks in Crop Productivity: Mechanisms, Breeding Strategies, and Chrono-Agricultural Applications
by Anita Hajdu, Nikolett Györe and László Kozma-Bognár
Agronomy 2026, 16(13), 1236; https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy16131236 (registering DOI) - 25 Jun 2026
Abstract
Circadian clocks are endogenous timing systems that coordinate plant physiology, metabolism, development, and stress responses with daily and seasonal environmental cycles. In crops, circadian and photoperiodic pathways influence agronomically important traits including photosynthesis, carbon allocation, flowering time, growth, stress resilience, and nutritional quality. [...] Read more.
Circadian clocks are endogenous timing systems that coordinate plant physiology, metabolism, development, and stress responses with daily and seasonal environmental cycles. In crops, circadian and photoperiodic pathways influence agronomically important traits including photosynthesis, carbon allocation, flowering time, growth, stress resilience, and nutritional quality. Although flowering time and photoperiod response pathways have long been indirectly exploited during domestication and breeding, the broader potential of circadian regulation for crop improvement and time-sensitive management remains only partially developed. This review examines the role of plant circadian clocks in crop productivity, with emphasis on molecular mechanisms, crop-specific clock-associated loci, breeding strategies, and chrono-agricultural applications. We summarize conserved and divergent features of the plant clock, including transcriptional repression and activation modules, environmental entrainment, and post-transcriptional regulatory layers. We then discuss how circadian regulation shapes productivity traits and highlight examples from rice, wheat, barley, maize, soybean, sorghum, tomato, and other crops. These examples show that agricultural adaptation often involves fine-tuning or rewiring circadian and photoperiodic outputs rather than maintaining a universal optimal clock state. Finally, we evaluate chrono-agriculture as an emerging framework for aligning management practices with biological timing. While controlled-environment agriculture and high-value horticultural systems are currently the most practical settings for testing chrono-agricultural strategies, open-field applications require careful consideration of environmental variability, sensor limitations, labour, machinery logistics, economic feasibility, and multi-environment validation. Integrating circadian biology with crop genetics, phenotyping, modelling, and agronomy may provide new opportunities to improve productivity, resilience, resource-use efficiency, and quality traits in sustainable agricultural systems. Full article
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