Plant Stress Resilience: From Physiological Perception to Omics-Driven Systems
A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant Response to Abiotic Stress and Climate Change".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 May 2026 | Viewed by 10
Special Issue Editor
Interests: plant responses to abiotic and biotic stresses; combination stresses; stress signaling; omics approaches; physiological characterization; crop improvement
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Climate change-driven environmental stresses such as drought, heat, freezing, salinity, and emerging pathogens are creating complex challenges for global agriculture and food security, affecting an ever-growing population. These multifaceted stresses frequently occur in combination (concurrently or sequentially), creating complex challenges that exceed the adaptive capacity of many crop varieties. Plants have evolved diverse adaptive strategies to survive, involving integrated changes in physiology, genetics, gene expression, metabolism, and developmental programming. A comprehensive understanding of how plants perceive, respond to, and recover from stress signals is essential for designing climate-resilient crops.
This Special Issue of Plants will highlight recent advances in stress resilience research, emphasizing integrative physiological and multi-omics approaches. We invite contributions that explore dynamic responses under abiotic and biotic stresses, including changes in photosynthesis, water and nutrient use efficiency (WUE and NUE), stomatal regulation, source–sink dynamics, and growth modulation. We especially welcome contributions employing genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenomics, and high-throughput phenomics to uncover key regulatory genes, stress biomarkers, gene functions, metabolic shifts, and tolerance pathways. Emphasis will be placed on studies linking physiological traits with omics data to identify biomarkers and key tolerance mechanisms. Topics of special interest include stress memory, alternative mRNA splicing, organ-specific responses, and long-distance signaling.
Reviews synthesizing emerging insights or proposing new models for stress adaptation are also encouraged. Particular emphasis will be given to research that effectively bridges the gap between molecular-level omics discoveries and measurable physiological or phenotypic outcomes.
This Special Issue aims to foster systems-level understanding in plant stress biology, accelerating innovative strategies for crop improvement. Submissions are welcomed from research on model plants, crops, and underutilized species.
Dr. Sajeevan Radha Sivarajan
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Plants is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- plant stress resistance
- multi-omics
- abiotic and biotic stress
- stress physiology
- crop improvement
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