Strawberry is an economically important horticultural crop cultivated worldwide. However, its growth, yield, and fruit quality are severely constrained by abiotic stresses, such as salinity, drought, and low temperature, as well as biotic stresses including pathogen attack and pest infestation. WRKY transcription factors (TFs) have been extensively characterized in model plants such as Arabidopsis and rice, and increasing evidence highlights their functional diversification and regulatory importance in horticultural crops, including tomato and grapevine. In this review, we summarize recent advances in understanding the roles of WRKY TFs in strawberry responses to both biotic and abiotic stresses, based on studies in both the diploid woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca L.) and the octoploid cultivated strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa Duchesne). We discuss their involvement in hormone crosstalk, redox regulation, and transcriptional control within complex stress-response networks, while distinguishing expression-based associations from experimentally validated regulatory functions. To provide a clear framework for evaluating the current evidence, we categorize the findings according to a hierarchy of experimental validation, ranging from direct functional characterization in strawberry, to transient assays, heterologous systems (e.g., Arabidopsis or tobacco), transcriptomic inferences, and predictions based on sequence homology. Finally, we outline potential future directions for exploiting strawberry WRKY TFs as candidate regulators in molecular breeding, thereby providing a theoretical basis for future functional studies and breeding applications.
Lin et al. (Sun,) studied this question.