Increasing biotic and abiotic stresses are seriously impeding the growth and yield of staple crops and threatening global food security. As one of the largest classes of regulators in vascular plants, WRKY transcription factors play critical roles governing flavonoid biosynthesis during stress responses. By binding major W-box cis-elements (TGACCA/T) in target promoters, WRKYs modulate diverse signaling pathways. In this review, we optimized existing WRKY phylogenetic trees by incorporating additional plant species with WRKY proteins implicated in stress tolerance and flavonoid regulation. Based on the improved frameworks and documented results, we aim to deduce unifying themes of distinct WRKY subfamilies governing specific stress responses and flavonoid metabolism. These analyses will generate experimentally testable hypotheses regarding the putative functions of uncharacterized WRKY homologs in tuning flavonoid accumulation to enhance stress resilience.

Since the first plant gene essential for arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis was identified, more than 170 such genes have been discovered. However, these findings remain scattered across species, and a systematic synthesis is urgently needed to guide future functional studies and breeding applications. This review provides a systematic classification and contextual overview of the currently reported plant genes essential for AM symbiosis, covering leguminous species (e.g., Medicago truncatula, Lotus japonicus) and non-leguminous species (e.g., Oryza sativa, Solanum lycopersicum). We classify these genes into functional modules corresponding to key stages of AM symbiosis: SL-mediated pre-symbiotic signaling, chitin signal perception, activation of the common symbiosis signaling pathway (CSSP), calcium (Ca²⁺) oscillation generation, arbuscule development and maintenance, and nutrient exchange. Beyond classification, we highlight conserved genetic modules across plant lineages and discuss their implications for engineering AM symbiosis in non-host or poorly symbiotic crops. This synthesis establishes a foundational genetic resource for molecular breeding aimed at enhancing nutrient-use efficiency and sustainable crop production.

Background: With the advancement of the next-generation sequencing technology, it is becoming more cost-effective to obtain plastomes from genome skimming data at shallow sequencing depth. Artemisia is a species-rich genus, comprising species of great medicinal or economic value. However, plastomes of Artemisia have not been thoroughly and comparatively analyzed, and the phylogenetic relationships within the genus are still not well resolved. Methods: In this study, 19 Artemisia plastomes were obtained from genome skimming data. Together with the plastomes retrieved from the public database, comparative analyses of their structure were also conducted. We further used sequences of plastomes and nuclear internal transcribed spacer sequences to conduct phylogenetic reconstruction. Results: The Artemisia plastomes are conserved in terms of structure, GC content, gene number, and order. Some regions, i.e., accD, ccsA, ndhE, ycf1, ccsA-ndhD, trnG^GCC-trnfM^CAU, were found to be variable and could be chosen as candidates for the DNA barcode. Phylogenetic analyses also confirmed that the four subgenera of Artemisia are not monophyletic. The incongruence between plastid and nuclear phylogenies indicated that hybridization events have occurred during the evolution of the genus. Conclusions: Reconstructed phylogenies using plastome sequences and nuclear internal transcribed spacers improved our understanding of the phylogenetic backbone of Artemisia. In the future, more taxa of Artemisia should be sequenced and analyzed to clarify the evolutionary history.