Crop height not only determines plant resistance to lodging and crowding, but also affects crop architecture, apical dominance, biomass, and mechanical harvesting. Plant height is determined by the internode elongation, regulated by genes involved in gibberellin (GA) and brassinosteroid (BR) biosynthesis or related signaling networks. Plants’ genetic inability to synthesize or respond to GAs and BRs induce dwarfness. However, the signaling mechanisms of GAs and BRs for controlling plant height individually or collectively are still unclear. Since stem mechanically supports plant during the whole life span, components that affect stem physical strength are also important to crop lodging resistance. One of the major components is lignin, which forms stem structure, thus contributing to crop lodging resistance. In this review, we looked into the reported genes involved in lignin, GAs, and BRs biosynthesis and summarized the signaling networks centered by these genes. Then, we filled the knowledge gap by modifying plant height through interrupting normal GA and BR metabolism utilizing core gene inhibitors. Therefore, we highly endorsed the current approaches of using plant growth regulators (PRGs) to maintain an ideal plant height under lodging stress, and proposed possibilities of modifying crop culm strength against lodging as well.

Soil salinity imposes osmotic, ionic, and oxidative stresses on plants, resulting in growth inhibition, developmental changes, metabolic adaptations, and ion sequestration or exclusion. Identifying salinity-tolerant resources and understanding physiological and molecular mechanisms of salinity tolerance could lay a foundation for the improvement of salinity tolerance in rice. In this study, a series of salinity-tolerance-related morphological and physiological traits were investigated in 46 rice genotypes, including Sea Rice 86, to reveal the main strategies of rice in responding to salinity stress at the seedling stage. No genotypes showed the same tolerance level as the two landraces Pokkali and Nona Bokra, which remain the donors for improving the salinity tolerance of rice. However, due to undesirable agronomic traits of these donors, alternative cultivars such as JC118S and R1 are recommended as novel source of salinity tolerance. Correlation and principal component analyses revealed that the salinity tolerance of rice seedlings is not only controlled by growth vigor but also regulated by ion transport pathways such as long-distance Na⁺ transport, root Na⁺ sequestration, and root K⁺ retention. Therefore, such key traits should be targeted in future breeding programs as the strategy of obtaining better Na⁺ exclusion is still the bottleneck for improving salinity tolerance in rice.

Plants coordinate their growth and developmental programs through dynamic communication in the core of the nucleus, enabling them to adapt to persistently high-temperature environments. Upon heat stress, plants primarily perceive and transduce thermal signals between the nucleus and other organelles, a process defined as nuclear-organellar communication. The published research on plants in response to heat environments mainly focuses on sensing heat physical signals from the plasma membrane (PM)/cytosol to the nucleus, eliciting nuclear transcriptional reprogramming and decoding organelle-derived retrograde signals to the nucleus. Consequently, plants have evolved sophisticated systems to decode adverse temperature signals relying on efficient nuclear-organellar coordination. This review summarizes how plants maintain cellular homeostasis via nuclear crosstalk. Heat signals are initially perceived, which triggers the production of secondary messengers including phosphatidic acid (PA), calcium ions (Ca²⁺) and reactive oxygen species (ROS). In addition, proteins also deliver thermal signals to the nucleus. As the central signaling hub, the nucleus orchestrates global transcriptional reprogramming predominantly through the Heat Shock Transcriptional Factors (HSFs)–heat shock proteins (HSPs) regulatory module, and sends instructions to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), chloroplasts and mitochondria. Conversely, organelle-derived retrograde signals coordinate stress adaptation: the unfolded protein response relieves ER stress, and heat stress activates ROS-mediated chloroplast-to-nucleus and mitochondria-to-nucleus feedback pathways. We further outline candidate thermosensing proteins residing in different organelles, and highlight major unsolved issues. Critical knowledge gaps include the intrinsic thermosensing capacity of chloroplasts and mitochondria, inter-organellar coordination of second-messenger dynamics, specific organelle functions, and the biological roles of membrane contact sites. Further mechanistic insights will facilitate the application of genome editing, synthetic biology and artificial-intelligence-aided design to breed heat-tolerant crops without yield penalties.

Crop improvement remains central in addressing global challenges related to food security, climate change, and sustainable agriculture