From stomatal movements to immunity and long-distance signaling: Ion channels mark the spot.

Beyond their established role in mineral nutrition, ion channels have been increasingly recognized as central hubs of plant signaling across multiple scales. Early research revealed functions in stomatal regulation and nutrient transport, with recent breakthroughs highlighting their critical involvement in immunity, development, and long-distance signaling via membrane potential dynamics and diverse ion fluxes. Multiple channels have been characterized as ligand, voltage, or mechanosensitive gated, often modulated by phosphorylation, effectively functioning as integrative hubs of defined stimuli. Structural characterization is now complementing electrophysiology, live-cell imaging, and mass spectrometry, allowing new levels of mechanistic characterization of ion channels in the context of signaling networks and offering new opportunities to engineer plant resilience to stress.