Improvement of the Resistance to Stress in Fruit Trees

Fruit trees (as perennial crops) are exposed to an array of stresses for a long time once they are planted. Adverse environmental conditions and high use of pesticides creates a drastic effect on the fruits’ productivity and survival. Many fruit growing regions are facing challenging environments, extreme weather condition, climate change, global warming, and high levels of insect/pest attacks during fruiting seasons, causing several billion USD losses to the fruit industry every year. These stresses causes physiological, morphological, and biochemical changes in fruits, thus affecting their vegetative growth and quality/quantity and producing unmarketable fruits, which eventually results in huge losses for growers. Fruits crops trigger different molecular mechanisms and produce certain biochemical compounds (i.e., secondary metabolites) in response to these stresses. This Special Issue aims to understand the resistance and tolerance of fruit crops, which varies from species to species and cultivar to cultivar. The prime objective is to enhance resistance in fruit crops at genetic (identifying resistance genes) and molecular levels and understanding the abiotic and biotic tolerance traits in primitive, wild, and cultivated species. Besides this, by adopting new technologies, updated crop management strategies, efficient crop systems, and developing/evaluating new rootstocks/scion combinations are some promising strategies to maintain fruit productivity and high yields and enhance the quality of perennial fruit crops.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• New culture practices to enhance fruits quality and productivity.
• Evaluating new rootstocks/scion combinations to increase resistance in fruit crops.
• Understanding the molecular response of crops against abiotic and biotic stress.
• Evaluate the physiological, morphological, and biochemical responses of fruit crops against stresses.
• Evolution and domestication of resistance traits in primitive, wild, and cultivated fruits.
• Diversity of secondary metabolites and their role in abiotic and abiotic stress tolerance.
• Developing new stress resistance cultivars.

Dr. Muhammad Junaid Rao
Guest Editor

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• abiotic stress
• biotic stress
• rootstock/scion combination
• tolerance traits
• resistance in fruits