Editorial: Salinity and drought stress in plants: understanding physiological, biochemical and molecular responses, volume II

作者：Sunil Kumar Sahu, Pingwu Liu, Umashankar Chandrasekaran, Muhammad Waseem · 发表于：Frontiers in Plant Science · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.3389/fpls.2025.1625602 · 被引用次数：9 · 研究领域：Plant Stress Responses and Tolerance、Plant responses to water stress、Plant Molecular Biology Research

Salinity and drought are among the most critical abiotic stressors affecting plant growth and productivity across the globe. These challenges are particularly acute in arid and semiarid regions, where climate change has intensified water scarcity and increased soil salinization (Huang and Jin, 2024;Sahu, 2024). These stresses disrupt fundamental plant functions, including photosynthesis, nutrient uptake, and cellular homeostasis. As the global population approaches 10 billion by the year 2050, agricultural systems must produce approximately 70% more food to ensure food and nutritional security (Sahu and Liu, 2023;Editorial, 2024). However, the increasing severity and frequency of salinity and drought conditions threaten this target. While severe stress might entirely limit plant development, moderate stress may activate a range of adaptive responses. These include transcriptional reprogramming, osmoprotectant buildup, alterations in stomatal behavior, and the activation of antioxidant defense systems. To create crop varieties with increased resilience, it is crucial to understand these reactions at the physiological, biochemical, and molecular levels.Recent advances in spatial omics have enabled researchers to uncover stress responses with celltype resolution, providing new insight into how plants adapt to heterogeneous stress environments (Guo et al., 2025;Zhong et al., 2025). Combined with CRISPR-based gene editing, highthroughput phenotyping, bioinformatics, and integrativ...