Breeding for multi-stress resilience in crops: Myth or possibility? 

Khazaei et al., 2026

Social Impact Statement

Climate change threatens millions of farmers worldwide by exposing crops to multiple concurrent or sequential environmental stresses such as drought, heat, waterlogging, and diseases. Although crops have long been selected under naturally occurring multi-stress conditions, breeding pipelines largely focus on optimal or single-stress environments, leaving complex stress combinations under-addressed. Developing crop cultivars that withstand multiple stress scenarios is essential for ensuring food security, food safety, and strengthening farmer resilience. Breeding for multi-stress resilience seems feasible but requires international collaboration among applied crop scientists, pure biologists, and policymakers to develop climate-resilient crops that sustain people and ecosystems.

Summary

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of combined abiotic and biotic stressors that may occur simultaneously or sequentially, dramatically reducing crop growth and yield stability. Plant breeding activities primarily target crop improvement for a single stressor, limiting crop resilience under complex environmental conditions. This opinion paper highlights the complexity of crop breeding for multi-stress growing conditions and discusses major challenges and opportunities to enable plant breeders to develop more climate-resilient crops. It also outlines the importance of integrating conventional breeding approaches with multi-omics and novel breeding technologies to develop multi-stress resilient crop cultivars. Identifying and validating key regulatory genes involved in multi-stress resilience and evaluating their performance across diverse genetic backgrounds, environments, and stress combination scenarios are needed. Although achieving complete multi-stress resilience remains an immense challenge, advances in integrative approaches and cross-disciplinary collaboration are steadily improving the potential to enhance crop resilience to multiple environmental stresses.

Graphical Abstract

Climate change threatens millions of farmers worldwide by exposing crops to multiple concurrent or sequential environmental stresses such as drought, heat, waterlogging, and diseases. Although crops have long been selected under naturally occurring multi-stress conditions, breeding pipelines largely focus on optimal or single-stress environments, leaving complex stress combinations under-addressed. Developing crop cultivars that withstand multiple stress scenarios is essential for ensuring food security, food safety, and strengthening farmer resilience. Breeding for multi-stress resilience seems feasible but requires international collaboration among applied crop scientists, pure biologists, and policymakers to develop climate-resilient crops that sustain people and ecosystems.

https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ppp3.70185?af=R

Root Microbiota: Orchestrating Architecture-Smart Crops

Chen et al., 2026

Crops depend on microbial partners for their growth, development, and overall resilience. A pivotal understanding has emerged showing the direct involvement of the root microbiota in regulating the tiller number of rice, a crucial architecture that influences yield. Novel frontiers in microbiological applications for agriculture highlight the profound role of the root microbiota in shaping crop architecture to boost productivity. We propose that improvements in crop production are moving from a genetic perspective on “architecture” to embracing “holobiont architecture.” As such, microbial orchestration provides a dynamic fine-tune function for breeding “architecture-smart crops” characterised by phenotypic plasticity under environmental uncertainty.

https://enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1751-7915.70307

From bacterial predators to partners: phages in agriculture

Salehimoghaddam et al., 2026

Bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, are critical players for shaping the taxonomic and functional composition of plant-associated microbiomes. Yet, their roles in plant health remain overlooked, along with their implications for sustainable agriculture. While phages are recognized as bacterial predators, they can also promote bacterial survival and competitiveness. Here, we highlight the roles phage play in shaping soil microbiomes and promising phage-based applications for sustainable agriculture. Ongoing research highlights the diverse roles of phages in regulating bacterial populations, enhancing nutrient cycling, improving stress tolerance, and suppressing soil-borne pathogens – microbial traits that directly link to plant health. Additionally, emerging applications such as bioremediation, phage-based biosensors, and microbiome engineering underscore phages' potential to revolutionize sustainable farming and optimize agricultural productivity.

https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.70959

Harnessing Plant–Microorganism Interactions to Mitigate Biotic and Abiotic Stresses for Sustainable Crops

Santana dos Santos et al., 2026

Climate change has intensified the occurrence of biotic and abiotic stresses, representing a major threat to agricultural productivity. This climate variability, coupled with the excessive use of agrochemicals, not only compromises environmental sustainability but also exacerbates food insecurity, directly affecting food availability and quality. In this context, biotechnological strategies have proven essential for mitigating the effects of stress on plants, promoting practices focused on agricultural sustainability. Notable among these strategies is the use of plant growth-promoting microorganisms, which are emerging as promising alternatives capable of improving plant tolerance to stress conditions and simultaneously reducing dependence on agrochemicals. These microorganisms can act as nitrogen fixers and solubilizers of nutrients, such as phosphorus and potassium. Additionally, they can influence plant immune responses by inducing systemic resistance and promoting the synthesis of phytohormones, such as auxins, cytokinins, and abscisic acid, which support plant development during the stress response. The interaction between plants and microorganisms represents a sustainable agricultural management strategy capable of enhancing crop tolerance to environmental adversities. In this review, we discuss the microorganisms known to establish beneficial interactions with plants, leading to improved performance under biotic and abiotic stress. Overall, this work highlights the potential of plant–microbe partnerships as a cornerstone for advancing sustainable agriculture in the face of global challenges.

https://www.mdpi.com/2223-7747/15/4/647

Dual-scale drivers of soil biodiversity in agroecosystems: Field management outweighs landscape effects, but both matter

Gao et al., 2026

1. Soil communities in agricultural fields are shaped by both farm management and surrounding landscape structure. However, their relative contribution and potential interactions remain unclear. Understanding these relationships is essential for conserving soil biodiversity, which underpins key ecosystem functions and services.
2. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a field soil sampling campaign across 87 farms in the Netherlands to assess how field-scale management and landscape structure in combination determine multiple soil communities, including bacteria, fungi, protists and invertebrates, in agroecosystems.
3. Landscape structure significantly influenced the diversity and composition of soil organisms in addition to the strong influence of field-scale management. In particular, the compositional landscape heterogeneity played a stronger role than configurational heterogeneity in shaping soil community composition. Importantly, the influence of landscape structure on soil diversity was independent of land use intensity at the field scale, with the exception of soil invertebrates.
4. Synthesis and applications. These findings highlight the need for conservation strategies that integrate both field-scale and landscape-scale planning. The promotion of diverse land use types might offer a practical pathway to maximize the effectiveness of soil biodiversity conservation within an intensively managed agricultural matrix.

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.70295

 

Holobiont:

a biological system consisting of an organism (e.g., an animal, a plant) and the community of microorganisms that live in close association with it.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1471492226000073

Increasing applied pesticide toxicity trends counteract the global reduction target to safeguard biodiversity

Wolfram et al., 2026

The 15th united Nations biodiversity Conference (COP15) obligates all countries to reduce pesticide risks by 50% by 2030. In this study, we derived the trends of total applied toxicity (TaT) globally between 2013 and 2019, weighting applied masses by ecotoxicity, of 625 pesticides for eight species groups to assess pathways toward this reduction goal. We found that the TaT of most species groups has increased; that only20 ± 14 pesticides per group define >90% of the TaT nationally; that fruits, vegetables, maize, soybean, rice, and other cereals contribute 76 to 83% of the global TaT; and that China, brazil, the united States, and India contribute 53 to 68% of the global TaT. Our target achievement categorization shows that substantial actions, combining shifts to less-toxic pesticides, increased adoption of organic agriculture, and also provision of national pesticide use data, will be required globally to approach the united Nations’ target.

https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.aea8602

Los árboles son santuarios. Quien sabe hablar con ellos, quien sabe escucharlos, puede aprender la verdad. No predican doctrinas ni preceptos; predican, sin dejarse perturbar por lo particular, la antigua ley de la vida.

Hesse, H. (1920). Árboles.

 Rhizophagy Cycle Explained by Dr. James White

A bacterial nutrition strategy for plant disease control

Wang et al., 2025

Xanthomonas spp. cause serious diseases in more than 400 plant species. The conserved AvrBs2 family effectors are among the most important virulence factors in xanthomonads, but how AvrBs2 promotes infection remains elusive. We found that AvrBs2 is a glycerophosphodiesterase-derived synthetase that catalyzes uridine 5′-diphosphate-α-d-galactose into a sugar phosphodiester, bis-(1,6)-cyclic dimeric α-d-galactose-phosphate, which is referred to as xanthosan. Xanthosan is synthesized by AvrBs2 in host cells and released into apoplastic spaces. Xanthomonas bacteria uptake xanthosan through the XanT transporter and hydrolyze it through the XanP phosphodiesterase for nutrition. AvrBs2, XanT, and XanP form a xanthosan “generation-uptake-utilization” system to provide a dedicated nutritional strategy to feed xanthomonads. Furthermore, elucidation of the AvrBs2-XanT-XanP virulence mechanism inspired us to develop an “anti-nutrition” strategy that should be applicable to control a wide variety of Xanthomonas diseases.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady8325