Climate change intensifies biotic and abiotic stresses, threatening global crop productivity. High-throughput phenotyping (HTP) technologies provide a non-destructive approach to monitor plant responses to environmental stresses, offering new opportunities for both crop stress resilience and breeding research. Innovations, such as hyperspectral imaging, unmanned aerial vehicles, and machine learning, enhance our ability to assess plant traits under various environmental stresses, including drought, salinity, extreme temperatures, and pest and disease infestations. These tools facilitate the identification of stress-tolerant genotypes within large segregating populations, improving selection efficiency for breeding programs. HTP can also play a vital role by accelerating genetic gain through precise trait evaluation for hybridization and genetic enhancement. However, challenges such as data standardization, phenotyping data management, high costs of HTP equipment, and the complexity of linking phenotypic observations to genetic improvements limit its broader application. Additionally, environmental variability and genotype-by-environment interactions complicate reliable trait selection. Despite these challenges, advancements in robotics, artificial intelligence, and automation are improving the precision and scalability of phenotypic data analyses. This review critically examines the dual role of HTP in assessment of plant stress tolerance and crop performance, highlighting both its transformative potential and existing limitations. By addressing key challenges and leveraging technological advancements, HTP can significantly enhance genetic research, including trait discovery, parental selection, and hybridization scheme optimization. While current methodologies still face constraints in fully translating phenotypic insights into practical breeding applications, continuous innovation in high-throughput precision phenotyping holds promise for revolutionizing crop resilience and ensuring sustainable agricultural production in a changing climate.

Heavy metal (HM) contamination threatens environmental sustainability, food safety, and agricultural productivity worldwide. HM toxicity adversely affects plant growth, reducing germination rates by 20–50%, impairing seedling establishment, and inhibiting shoot and root development by 30–60% in various crops. HM disrupts key physiological processes, including photosynthesis, stomatal regulation, membrane integrity, nutrient uptake, and enzymatic and nonenzymatic antioxidant activities. These disruptions largely result from oxidative stress, caused by the excessive accumulation of reactive oxygen species, which damage cellular components. To counteract HM toxicity, plants deploy a complex defense network involving antioxidant enzymes, metal chelation by phytochelatins and metallothioneins, vacuolar sequestration, and symbiotic interactions with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, which can retain 40–70% of metals in roots and reduce translocation to shoots. At the molecular level, MAPK (Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase) signaling pathways, transcription factors (e.g., WRKY, MYB, bZIP, and NAC), and phytohormonal crosstalk regulate the expression of stress-responsive genes expression to enhance HM stress tolerance. Advances in nanotechnology offer promising strategies for the remediation of HM-contaminated soils and water sources (HM remediation); engineered and biogenic nanoparticles (e.g., ZnO, Fe₃O₄) improve metal immobilization, reduce bioavailability, and enhance plant growth by 15–35% under HM stresses, although excessive doses may induce phytotoxicity. Future applications of nanotechnology in HM remediation should consider nanoparticle transformation (e.g., dissolution and agglomeration) and environmentally relevant concentrations to ensure efficacy and minimize phytotoxicity. Integrating phytoremediation with nanoparticle-enabled strategies provides a sustainable approach for HM remediation. This review emphasizes the need for a multidisciplinary framework linking plant science, biotechnology, and nanoscience to advance HM remediation and safeguard agricultural productivity.

Metalloid contamination, such as arsenic poisoning, poses a significant environmental problem, reducing plant productivity and putting human health at risk. Phytohormones are known to regulate arsenic stress; however, the function of strigolactones (SLs) in arsenic stress tolerance in rice is rarely investigated. Here, we investigated shoot responses of wild-type (WT) and SL-deficient d10 and d17 rice mutants under arsenate stress to elucidate SLs’ roles in rice adaptation to arsenic. Under arsenate stress, the d10 and d17 mutants displayed severe growth abnormalities, including phenotypic aberrations, chlorosis and biomass loss, relative to WT. Arsenate stress activated the SL-biosynthetic pathway by enhancing the expression of SL-biosynthetic genes D10 and D17 in WT shoots. No differences in arsenic levels between WT and SL-biosynthetic mutants were found from Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry analysis, demonstrating that the greater growth defects of mutant plants did not result from accumulated arsenic in shoots. The d10 and d17 plants had higher levels of reactive oxygen species, water loss, electrolyte leakage and membrane damage but lower activities of superoxide dismutase, ascorbate peroxidase, glutathione peroxidase and glutathione S-transferase than did the WT, implying that arsenate caused substantial oxidative stress in the SL mutants. Furthermore, WT plants had higher glutathione (GSH) contents and transcript levels of OsGSH1, OsGSH2, OsPCS1 and OsABCC1 in their shoots, indicating an upregulation of GSH-assisted arsenic sequestration into vacuoles. We conclude that arsenate stress activated SL biosynthesis, which led to enhanced arsenate tolerance through the stimulation of cellular antioxidant defense systems and vacuolar sequestration of arsenic, suggesting a novel role for SLs in rice adaptation to arsenic stress. Our findings have significant implications in the development of arsenic-resistant rice varieties for safe and sustainable rice production in arsenic-polluted soils.

Rice (Oryza sativa) is a major crop and a main food for a major part of the global population. Rice species have derived from divergent agro-climatic regions, and thus, the local germplasm has a large genetic diversity. This study investigated the relationship between phenotypic and genetic variabilities of yield and yield-associated traits in Aus rice to identify short-duration, high-yielding genotypes. Targeting this issue, a field experiment was carried out to evaluate the performance of 51 Aus rice genotypes, including 50 accessions in F₅ generation and one short-duration check variety BINAdhan-19. The genotypes exhibited a large and significant variation in yield and its associated traits, as evidenced by a wide range of their coefficient of variance. The investigated traits, including days to maturity (DM), plant height (PH), panicle length (PL) and 1000-grain weight (TW) exhibited a greater genotypic coefficient of variation than the environmental coefficient of variation. In addition, the high broad-sense heritability of DM, PH, PL and TW traits suggests that the genetic factors significantly influence the observed variations in these traits among the F₅ Aus rice accessions. This study also revealed that the grain yield per hill (GY) displayed a significant positive correlation with PL, number of filled grains per panicle (FG) and TW at both genotype and phenotype levels. According to the hierarchical and K-means cluster analyses, the accessions BU-R-ACC-02, BU-R-ACC-08 and R2-36-3-1-1 have shorter DM and relatively higher GY than other Aus rice accessions. These three accessions could be employed in the ongoing and future breeding programs for the improvement of short-duration and high-yielding rice cultivars.

Salinity stress is a major threat to agriculture and global food security. Chemical priming is a promising approach to improving salinity stress tolerance in plants. To identify small molecules with the capacity to enhance salinity stress tolerance in plants, chemical screening was performed using Arabidopsis thaliana. We screened 6400 compounds from the Nagoya University Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecule (ITbM) chemical library and identified one compound, Natolen128, that enhanced salinity-stress tolerance. Furthermore, we isolated a negative compound of Natolen128, namely Necolen124, that did not enhance salinity stress tolerance, though it has a similar chemical structure to Natolen128. We conducted a transcriptomic analysis of Natolen128 and Necolen124 to investigate how Natolen128 enhances high-salinity stress tolerance. Our data indicated that the expression levels of 330 genes were upregulated by Natolen128 treatment compared with that of Necolen124. Treatment with Natolen128 increased expression of hypoxia-responsive genes including ethylene biosynthetic enzymes and PHYTOGLOBIN, which modulate accumulation of nitric oxide (NO) level. NO was slightly increased in plants treated with Natolen128. These results suggest that Natolen128 may regulate NO accumulation and thus, improve salinity stress tolerance in A. thaliana.