Harnessing Epigenetic Mechanisms for Crop Resilience: A Comprehensive Review of Plant Responses to Biotic and Abiotic Stresses

Climate change is leading to significant biotic and abiotic stresses, which is alarming for the future of sustainable crop production and improvement. Global agriculture faces mounting challenges. Understanding epigenetic mechanisms can help improve crops. Exploring plant epigenetic mechanisms can enhance crop resilience, productivity, and stress tolerance, ensuring food security for the growing global populations. Epigenetic mechanisms often involve heritable modifications in organisms without any direct changes in the Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA). Epigenetics is essential for making plants adaptive to different stressed conditions. Abiotic and biotic stresses are major limiting factors for plant growth, development, and survival. Epigenetic mechanisms, such as DNA methylation, histone tail modifications, and Ribonucleic Acid (RNA)-directed pathways, regulate gene expression and allow plants to develop memory against these stresses. This memory is crucial for plants to respond effectively to uncertain stresses in the future. These epigenetic modifications are heritable to the next generations. Researchers have shown that plants use epigenetic memory to adapt to a rapidly changing environment, particularly harsh biotic and abiotic challenges, enabling plants to enhance their ability to adapt to diverse environments and withstand abrupt changes in their surroundings. A thorough understanding of these mechanisms can help us develop safer and more efficient methods of crop improvement to make crops more resilient and create a food-secure future for generations. The mechanisms of RNA-directed pathways, DNA methylation, and histone tail modifications are critical in modulating plant responses to diverse stressors, as they directly take part in the expression and suppression of targeted genes.