Plant Metabolites and Their Reprogramming for Plant Tolerance under Environmental Stress

Dear Colleagues,

Environmental stresses negatively impact plant growth and development and reduce crop yields, which compromises the food supply for the ever-growing world population. Environmental stresses, including salinity, drought, flooding, extreme temperatures, nutrient deficiency, and excessive heavy metals are major constraints that affect plant development, growth, and reproduction, posing serious threats to plant life. Plant metabolites, including primary and secondary metabolites, are important compounds of plant development and are going through reprogramming in plant responses to stresses. Mass-spectrometry-based tools have been the most extensively used in plant metabolomics applications to explore the molecular and biochemical mechanisms that underlie plant acclimatizations to changing environments. Plants respond to abiotic stresses by altering several aspects, including gene expression and the contents of primary and secondary metabolites. These multifaceted changes enable plants to adapt to and tolerate adverse circumstances. Priming compounds, such as natural metabolites or synthetic compounds, have shown an excellent opportunity to increase environmental stress tolerance in various plants (agricultural crops and medicinal plants, etc.) without modification of their genome. Growing evidence has indicated the importance of metabolic reprogramming and priming to enhance abiotic stress tolerance in a wide range of important crops. 

This Special Issue aims to collect scientific contributions that can provide more insights into metabolic adjustments and their regulations in plants. Characterization of the metabolite composition in plants grown under environmental stress conditions can help us to decipher the innovative metabolic signaling pathways. The utilization of metabolite priming as protectants to enhance environmental stress tolerance in plants is extremely promising.

This Special Issue welcomes the submission of reviews (full or mini-reviews) and original research articles or short communications on topics related to plant metabolites, plant priming, and their metabolic reprogramming under environmental stresses.

Dr. Lam-Son Phan Tran
Dr. Manish Kumar Patel
Guest Editors

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