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Abiotic stresses such as drought, heat, cold, salinity and flooding significantly impact plant growth, development and productivity. As the planet has warmed, these abiotic stresses have increased in frequency and intensity, affecting the global food supply and making it imperative to develop stress-resilient crops. In the past 20 years, the development of omics technologies has contributed to the growth of datasets for plants grown under a wide range of abiotic environments. Integration of these rapidly growing data using machine-learning (ML) approaches can complement existing breeding efforts by providing insights into the mechanisms underlying plant responses to stressful conditions, which can be used to guide the design of resilient crops. In this review, we introduce ML approaches and provide examples of how researchers use these approaches to predict molecular activities, gene functions and genotype responses under stressful conditions. Finally, we consider the potential and challenges of using such approaches to enable the design of crops that are better suited to a changing environment. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Crops under stress: can we mitigate the impacts of climate change on agriculture and launch the ‘Resilience Revolution’?’.
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This content will become publicly available on May 29, 2026
Crops under stress: can we mitigate the impacts of climate change on agriculture and launch the ‘Resilience Revolution’?
Climate change is altering our environment, subjecting multiple agroecosystems worldwide to an increased frequency and intensity of abiotic stress conditions such as heat, drought, flooding, salinity, cold and/or their potential combinations. These stresses impact plant growth, yield and survival, causing losses of billions of dollars to agricultural productivity, and in extreme cases they lead to famine, migration and even wars. As the rate of change in our environment has dramatically accelerated in recent years, more research is urgently needed to discover and develop new ways and tools to increase the resilience of crops to different stress conditions. In this theme issue, new studies addressing the molecular, metabolic, and physiological responses of crops and other plants to abiotic stress challenges are discussed, as well as the potential to exploit these mechanisms in biotechnological applications aimed at preserving and/or increasing crop yield under our changing climate conditions. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Crops under stress: can we mitigate the impacts of climate change on agriculture and launch the ‘Resilience Revolution’?’
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- Award ID(s):
- 2414183
- PAR ID:
- 10613832
- Publisher / Repository:
- Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Volume:
- 380
- Issue:
- 1927
- ISSN:
- 0962-8436
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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