Transcending jasmonate-mediated growth-defense trade-off: Pathways to unlock plant potential

Jasmonate (JA) is a pivotal phytohormone balancing defense and growth processes to orchestrate plant survival based on external conditions. While JA-mediated resistance against biotic and abiotic threats offers promising avenues for crop improvement, its concurrent growth suppression poses a fundamental challenge in agricultural practices. This review synthesizes recent advances in understanding of JA-mediated growth-defense trade-off (GDT), with a special focus on innovative strategies to decouple JA-induced defense from growth inhibition, including expanding photosynthetic capacity, rewiring JA signaling, optimizing rapid JA bursts and degrading targeted protein via subtype-selective JA agonists. We further propose future research directions to advance the field of transcending JA-mediated GDT in crops, such as fine-tuning chloroplast functionality, manipulating DAMPs signaling as well as remodeling JA regulators. By integrating these insights, we provide strategic frameworks for fundamentally re-engineering the JA pathways to develop plants with more resilience and sustained productivity.