From Shared Mechanisms to Precision Breeding: Engineering Cold and Drought Cross-Tolerance in Crops

TL;DR

This paper reviews how plants can be bred to tolerate both cold and drought stresses by leveraging shared biological mechanisms, aiming to improve crop resilience.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive overview of cold-drought cross-talk mechanisms and their application in precision breeding strategies.

Findings

Shared signaling networks and regulatory layers underlie cold and drought cross-tolerance in plants.

Transcriptional reprogramming via DREB/CBF modules plays a central role in stress response.

Precision breeding techniques can be used to develop crops with stable multi-stress tolerance.

Abstract

Low temperature and drought are among the most pervasive abiotic stresses limiting crop productivity worldwide, and their frequent co-occurrence or alternation imposes compounded constraints on agricultural sustainability. Increasing evidence supports cross-tolerance, whereby exposure to one stress enhances resistance to another, as an emergent property of shared signaling networks and integrative regulatory layers. In this review, we summarize recent advances in understanding cold–drought cross-talk, from early stress perception and secondary messengers to hormonal coordination via abscisic acid, transcriptional reprogramming centered on dehydration responsive element binding protein/C repeat binding factor (DREB/CBF) modules, and longer-term regulatory memory mediated by chromatin remodeling and biomolecular condensates. Importantly, we further discuss how these mechanistic insights can be translated into precision breeding strategies, including genome editing, allele mining, and backcross-assisted introgression, to accelerate the development of crop varieties with stable multi-stress tolerance. Finally, we highlight future directions for integrating multi-omics, high-throughput phenotyping, and data-driven approaches to enable efficient molecular design breeding for complex stress environments.

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