Recovery and Memory of Plants during Recurrent Stresses

Dear Colleagues,

Changing climate strongly affects plant performance, which not only impacts the spatial distribution of natural species but also crop production in terms of quantity and quality. Ongoing and projected climate disruption highlight an increased frequency of extreme weather events, which also affect the spread of biotic stresses, thus leading to environmental instability that the plant must face to survive and reproduce. Although the stress responses to a wide range of environmental cues are well understood, they need to be deciphered from the perspective of the plant’s ability to respond to recurrent stressful conditions to capture responses to realistic climatic features. In contrast to long-lasting stressing events, recurrent stresses trigger different responses. The overall magnitude of the plant response to the succession of stress events separated by non-stress events may not match the additional individual responses to each event. Plant responses to stress events might be alleviated if they were previously challenged by a previous similar stress through both a recovery effect (partial, complete, compensatory, and even, in a few cases, over-compensatory recovery upon the return to favorable conditions) and/or a priming effect (i.e., the ability to develop an earlier, more rapid, intense, and sensitive response when the second stress occurs). Stress recovery and/or memory are not obligate processes, which creates the question of the environmental or plant characteristics cues that are triggered or prevented by the event.

This Special Issue tackles the challenge of disentangling the range of responses to recurrent stresses to shed some light on plant memory leading to stress acclimation. The Issue will accept reviews as well as full or short research papers from a broad scope of interdisciplinary research on plant responses to recurrent stresses ranging from molecular to growth, development and final performance, as well as physiological processes.

Particularly welcome are research papers on the following topics:

• Evidence or absence of plant memory when plants are subjected to recurrent stresses;
• Disentangling crop memory stress memory from further developmental adjustments and strategies;
• Plant acclimation to biotic or abiotic stresses at the crop cycle level and/or across generations;
• Plant recovery after a period of stress;
• Benefits of stress priming not only at the plant cycle level (i.e., somatic memory) but also across generations (i.e., inter/transgenerational memory).

Dr. Christine Granier
Dr. Sophie Brunel-Muguet
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• stress memory
• recurrent stresses
• stress recovery
• multi-scale plasticity
• crops
• model plants