This review reframes wheat salinity adaptation as a crosstalk-driven process linking early root perception with whole-plant acclimation and yield-related outcomes, and identifies key signaling hubs and physiological trade-offs that may guide breeding, genome editing, priming, and agronomic strategies for improving wheat performance under saline environments.
Abstract
Abstract Soil salinity limits wheat productivity by disrupting water uptake, Na⁺/K⁺ homeostasis, photosynthesis, reproductive development, and grain filling. Although wheat salinity tolerance is often discussed in terms of individual traits such as Na⁺ exclusion, antioxidant defense, osmolyte accumulation, or abscisic acid signaling, these responses operate as interconnected signaling networks. This review reframes wheat salinity adaptation as a crosstalk-driven process linking early root perception with whole-plant acclimation and yield-related outcomes. At the root-soil interface, salinity rapidly lowers external water potential, alters membrane potential, disturbs ion fluxes, and induces early Ca2⁺, reactive oxygen species (ROS), pH, nitric oxide, electrical, and phosphorylation signals. Ca2⁺ sensors and decoders, including CaM/CMLs, CDPKs, and CBL-CIPK modules, connect these early signals with ROS regulation, ion-transporter activity, kinase cascades, and transcriptional reprogramming. ABA integrates osmotic stress with stomatal closure, hydraulic adjustment, compatible-solute accumulation, and water-use regulation, whereas additional hormonal and metabolic signals shape root architecture, growth restraint, senescence, source-sink balance, and reproductive protection. Wheat-specific evidence strongly supports the importance of HKT1;5-mediated Na⁺ retrieval, SOS-like ion regulation, K⁺ retention, antioxidant capacity, ABA-associated water regulation, osmotic adjustment, and genotype-dependent transcriptional responses. However, several important signaling models, including precise Ca2⁺ signatures, real-time Ca2⁺-ROS feedback dynamics, guard-cell ABA-ROS-Ca2⁺ signaling, systemic Ca2⁺/ROS waves, and salinity-specific sugar-redox-hormone control of grain filling, remain incompletely validated in wheat. By distinguishing wheat-supported mechanisms from conserved model-plant frameworks, this review identifies key signaling hubs and physiological trade-offs that may guide breeding, genome editing, priming, and agronomic strategies for improving wheat performance under saline environments.
Soil salinity is a major threat to crop productivity, sustainable agriculture, and global food security, with more than 833 million hectares of land affected worldwide. Salt stress restricts plant growth through osmotic stress, ion toxicity, oxidative damage, membrane disruption, reduced photosynthesis, and yield loss. Plants respond through coordinated regulatory networks that connect early stress perception with ion balance, osmotic adjustment, hormone signaling, transcript regulation, and protein modification. Recent advances have identified several sensory and signaling modules involved in salinity responses, including calcium signaling, receptor like kinases, FERONIA, OSCA, MOCA, annexins, and mechanosensitive channels that detect ionic, osmotic, and mechanical changes. Established pathways such as the SOS pathway and GABA shunt are included as established background mechanisms for sodium homeostasis and metabolic adjustment under saline conditions. Hormonal networks involving abscisic acid, ethylene, jasmonic acid, auxin, gibberellins, and brassinosteroids coordinate root architecture, stomatal control, antioxidant defense, growth restraint, and post-stress recovery. Emerging regulatory layers mediated by microRNAs, phosphorylation, ubiquitination, and SUMOylation further fine tune transcript stability, protein activity, ion transport, redox balance, and stress resilience. A central challenge is the translational gap between model species and crops, since many mechanisms defined in Arabidopsis and rice still lack functional validation in major crop species and halophytes. Integrating conserved and species dependent mechanisms with crop centered validation will help convert molecular knowledge into breeding, genome editing, and management strategies for saline agriculture.
Muhammad Usman, Li Wang, Xiaojuan An et al.· Plant Science· 0 citations
This review comprehensively synthesizes recent advances in abiotic stress perception, signal transduction and hormone‐mediated regulation, highlighting their roles in shaping plant stress tolerance and proposes an integrated multi‐scale framework to provide a holistic understanding of drought and salinity stress tolerance and to guide the development of resilient crop systems.
Muhammad Farooq, A. Khan, A. Hassan et al.· Plant Breeding· 1 citation
A phytohormone-centric framework is proposed to select strains that optimize growth, ion homeostasis and plant stress resilience under salinity, integrating molecular evidence with morpho-physiological studies and proposing a phytohormone-centric framework to select strains that optimize growth, ion homeostasis and plant stress resilience under salinity.
Arghyadeepa Moharana, Lochan Dhruw, Armita Chakraborty et al.· International Journal of Mol...· 0 citations
Abiotic stresses such as salinity, heavy metal toxicity, drought, and extreme temperatures severely limit plant growth and agricultural productivity by disrupting cellular homeostasis and inducing excessive reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation. Hydrogen-rich water (HRW), has emerged as a promising eco-friendly strategy for enhancing plant stress tolerance. This review synthesizes current knowledge on HRW-mediated stress alleviation, offering an integrated framework of antioxidant regulation, hormonal crosstalk, and signal transduction. HRW confers protection through selective scavenging of cytotoxic radicals while preserving signaling ROS, upregulates enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants to maintain redox balance, regulates ion homeostasis and osmolyte accumulation, and protects chloroplast and mitochondrial integrity. Furthermore, HRW modulates gene expression and stress-responsive pathways via interactions with phytohormones and gaseous signaling networks. This integrated approach distinguishes the present work by bridging previously dispersed mechanistic insights across multiple stress types. Despite promising findings, challenges remain regarding hydrogen perception mechanisms, application standardization, and field-level validation. Advancing these areas will support the integration of HRW into sustainable agricultural practices for improved crop resilience.
Lei Huang, Yingqi Hu, Yi Wang et al.· Frontiers in Plant Science· 0 citations
This integrated framework identifies Si as a context-dependent modulator of plant–rhizosphere interactions and provides a mechanistic basis for developing precise and sustainable Si-based salinity-management strategies.
Climate change is intensifying drought, salinity, heat, chilling, flooding, and heavy-metal stresses across major fruit-producing regions, threatening yield stability and fruit quality in economically vital, perennial crops such as apple, grapevine, citrus, banana, strawberry, and peach. Because these species are long-lived, highly heterozygous, and polyploid, conventional breeding for climate resilience remains slow and often inadequate, necessitating molecular strategies informed by systems-level understanding. This review synthesizes recent advances in multi-omics research spanning genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenomics, ionomics, and phenomics that have collectively decoded the regulatory architecture underlying abiotic stress perception, signaling, and tolerance in fruit crops. Hormonal networks, particularly abscisic acid (ABA) crosstalk with jasmonate, salicylic acid, ethylene, and brassinosteroids, emerge as central integrators of stress responses, coordinating stomatal regulation, osmolyte accumulation, antioxidant defense, and secondary metabolite biosynthesis. Genomic and pangenomic approaches have identified stress-associated loci and cultivar-specific structural variants, while transcriptomic and proteomic studies reveal transcription factor networks (MdERF38–MdMYB1, MaMYB4–MaHDA2, VvDREB1, CsNAC29) and post-translational regulatory switches governing tolerance mechanisms across drought, cold, salinity, and flooding stress. Metabolomic and ionomic profiling link biochemical reprogramming to fruit quality traits, whereas epigenomic mechanisms including DNA methylation, histone modifications, and small RNA regulation provide a chromatin-level layer mediating stress memory across growing seasons. Integration of these omics layers through systems biology, machine learning, and high-throughput phenomics is enabling functional validation via CRISPR-Cas9 and marker-assisted selection, translating correlative associations into causally validated breeding targets. Despite this progress, challenges including batch effects, tissue heterogeneity, and methodological inconsistencies in data integration continue to constrain translational applications. This highlights convergent regulatory hubs across stress types and species, underscoring multi-omics-guided precision breeding as the most promising pathway toward developing climate-resilient, high-quality fruit crop cultivars for sustainable global production.
