Emerging Mechanisms of Plant Responses to Abiotic Stress
Wan Zhao, Xiaojie Chen, Jiahuan Wang, Zhongjie Cheng, Xuhui Ma, Qi Zheng, Zhao‐Shi Xu, Fuyan Zhang
Abstract
Plants continuously face multiple abiotic stresses, including drought, salinity, heat, cold, and heavy metal, that challenge cellular homeostasis and threaten global crop productivity. Recent research reveals that these stress responses are not isolated but interconnected through shared hormonal, redox, and transcriptional networks. This review provides an integrative synthesis of current advances in stress signaling, emphasizing how perception, transduction, and memory layers are hierarchically organized across distinct stress types. We outline key regulatory hubs-such as ABA-centered hormonal crosstalk, chloroplast-nucleus redox communication, and epigenetic priming-that coordinate systemic tolerance. Furthermore, we highlight emerging evidence for stress-specific modules that operate under combined stresses (e.g., drought-heat, salinity-cold), providing a unified framework for understanding how plants integrate multi-dimensional signals. This synthesis offers a conceptual perspective linking signaling architecture to adaptive outcomes, aiming to inform future strategies for engineering multi-stress-resilient crops.