Frontiers in Plant Science最新文献

Phytopathogens are among the major biotic stressors limiting global crop productivity. Conventional control methods, including chemical pesticides and fungicides, have contributed to pathogen resistance, environmental pollution, and soil degradation, highlighting the need for sustainable alternatives. This review highlights innovative, eco-friendly strategies that exploit plant-microbe interactions to enhance plant health and resilience across diverse agroecosystems. Rhizosphere-, phyllosphere-, and endosphere-associated microbial assemblages contribute to plant immune enhancement through induced systemic resistance, competitive nutrient exclusion, antimicrobial metabolite production, and mycoparasitism. The review emphasizes the functional roles of beneficial microbial communities and the emerging applications of synthetic consortia and bio-organic fertilizers to improving disease suppression, nutrient use efficiency, and soil fertility. In addition, recent progress in omics-based tools and microbial formulation technologies is discussed as a key driver for translating laboratory findings into practical field applications. However, large-scale implementation remains challenged by high research costs, limited metagenomic infrastructure, and the lack of standardized microbial formulations across environments. Strengthening institutional capacity, integrating omics-based tools, and improving technology transfer will be essential to unlock the full potential of microbiome-based pathogen control. Overall, this review highlights microbiome-based interventions as a sustainable alternative to chemical-intensive plant protection strategies under changing environmental conditions.

Introduction: Wildfires are becoming an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in sub-Mediterranean regions, including areas where the vegetation is not historically adapted to fire. However, post-fire successional dynamics in these regions remain poorly documented.

Methods: Vegetation was monitored annually for three years (2023-2025) following a major wildfire on the Kras Plateau (SW Slovenia) in 2022. Monitoring was conducted in 50 permanent plots assigned to five fire-severity classes, including unburned control plots (class 0) and four burned classes (classes 1, 2a, 2b, and 3). We analyzed species composition, vegetation structure, ecological indicator values, species origin and habitat preference, and plant functional traits using ordination and trait-based approaches.

Results: Post-fire succession followed an initial floristic composition model and an enhanced autosuccessional pathway across all fire-severity classes. The early dominance of ephemeral and ruderal species declined rapidly, while the abundance of perennial grasses, shrubs, and resprouting woody species increased. Functional traits shifted along the C-R axis of Grime's CSR strategy framework: from ruderal towards competitive and stress-tolerant, and successional trajectories consistently converged towards zonal thermophilous deciduous forest communities. High amounts of precipitation facilitated rapid structural recovery, with shrubland developing within three years.

Conclusion: Sub-Mediterranean forest vegetation on the Kras Plateau exhibits high resilience to wildfire, despite limited historical adaptation to fire. Enhanced autosuccession, combined with favorable post-fire moisture conditions, enables rapid recovery and reduces the likelihood of long-term degradation or the establishment of persistent post-fire shrublands.

Malania oleifera Chun & S.K. Lee is a rare and endangered tree species endemic to the karst forests of southwestern China. Its seeds are rich in nervonic acid, a compound of significant ecological and economic value. However, habitat fragmentation, overharvesting, and climate change have imposed severe survival pressures on this species, leading to a risk of genetic diversity loss. In this study, we employed genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) to investigate the genome-wide genetic diversity and population structure of 89 individuals from 16 natural populations. A total of 332,551 high-quality single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were obtained. The results showed moderate genetic diversity, with populations in Guangxi exhibiting significantly higher nucleotide diversity than those in Yunnan. Population structure analyses identified six genetic clusters that corresponded closely to their geographic distribution, indicating that geographic isolation is the main driver of genetic differentiation. Mantel tests revealed a highly significant positive correlation between genetic and geographic distances but no correlation with environmental distance, representing a typical isolation-by-distance (IBD) pattern. Redundancy analysis (RDA) identified 4,361 SNPs significantly associated with environmental variables suggesting potential local adaptation signals. Demographic reconstruction revealed that M. oleifera began a sharp and continuous decline in effective population size approximately 30 kya, likely triggered by climatic fluctuations during the Last Glacial Maximum. These findings provide valuable insights for the conservation, restoration, and regional management of this ecologically and economically important species.

Drought is a major problem to mungbean (Vigna radiata L.) productivity, necessitating the identification of tolerant genotypes and the exploration of their adaptive mechanisms. This study evaluated seven mungbean genotypes 'BARI Mung-8', 'BMX-010015', 'K851', 'L-92', 'BARI Mung-1', 'FH-18', and 'PDM-139' under control and drought treatments to characterize their physiological, biochemical, and molecular responses. Physiological traits, including chlorophyll content, photosynthesis rate (Pn), cell membrane stability (CMS), and relative water content (RWC), varied significantly (p≤ 0.05). Under drought, 'BARI Mung-8', 'BMX-010015', and 'K851' maintained chl content of 1.85-2.10 mg g^-1 FW and Pn of 138-145 μmol m^-2 s^-1, compared to 1.25 mg g^-1 FW and 78 μmol m^-2 s^-1 in 'BARI Mung-1'. These tolerant lines also retained high RWC (89-92%) and CMS (84-86%). Biochemically, they accumulated greater osmolytes, proline (38.7-42.1 µg g^-1 FW) and glycine betaine (118-132 µg g^-1 FW), and depicted enhanced antioxidant enzyme activities, including SOD (39.8-41.2 U mg^-1 protein) and CAT (14.5-15.2 U mg^-1 protein). Principal component analysis (PCA) and heatmap clustering grouped tolerant genotypes with these key adaptive traits, illustrating combined stress-response processes. Gene expression profiling showed significant upregulation (2.5-4.8 fold) of osmotic adjustment genes (VrP5CS1, VrBADH), antioxidant defense genes (VrSOD1, VrCAT1, VrPOD1), water transport gene (VrPIP2-1), and stress signaling genes (VrDREB2A, VrLEA3). The aquaporin gene VrPIP2-1 was associated with higher RWC, while VrCHLH stability supported chl retention. Integration of physiological, biochemical, and molecular data proved that drought tolerance in mungbean is regulated by coordinated cellular hydration, osmotic regulation, ROS detoxification, and transcriptional activation. "BARI Mung-8', 'BMX-010015', 'K851', and 'L-92' emerged as eminent candidates for breeding programs targeting drought-prone environments, and the identified genes provide potential markers for selection of genotypes in climate-resilient legume improvement.

Introduction: To address the problems of low detection accuracy, severe background interference, and poor real-time performance existing in current object detection models in complex agricultural monitoring scenarios, we proposed Focal-HAIN (F-HAIN), a lightweight object detection model tailored for embedded platforms.

Methods: Built on the YOLOv5 architecture with design insights from RT-DETR, the proposed model incorporates two key structural enhancements to improve multi-scale feature representation and localization precision. Firstly, focus modulation was integrated into the neck network, and the F-SPPELAN module was designed to achieve adaptive and precise modulation of the feature channel based on the focus loss-guided attention mechanism. This effectively suppresses background noise and enhances the model's response to small targets. Secondly, the HAIN module was constructed. By introducing a deep interlacing fusion strategy, feature interaction operations within the scale are embedded into the cross-scale feature aggregation path, thereby enhancing the correlation among multi-scale features and improving positioning accuracy. This study conducted comprehensive experiments on the IP102 dataset and deployed the model on a Raspberry Pi 4B embedded device for real-time performance verification.

Results: The experimental results show that the mAP50 of F-HAIN can reach 90.1%. Under the same experimental conditions, compared with models such as RT-DETR, YOLOv5, YOLOv8, YOLOv10, and YOLOv11, the performance of F-HAIN on mAP50 increased by 5.5%, 6.8%, 4.9%, 5.4%, and 3.0%, respectively. Meanwhile, F-HAIN maintains a high-speed inference of 161 FPS on a high-performance workstation and was successfully deployed in an IoT-based collaborative system where a Raspberry Pi 4B serves as the edge acquisition terminal.

Discussion: These findings demonstrate that F-HAIN effectively balances high detection accuracy with computational efficiency, providing a robust and deployable solution for real-time agricultural monitoring on resource-constrained edge devices.

Hyperspectral crop classification is often challenged by substantial intra-class spectral variability, high inter-class similarity, and the scarcity of high-quality labeled samples. These issues frequently lead to insufficient feature fusion or excessive computational complexity in conventional classification methods. To address these problems, this study proposes MDPC-Net, a limited sample hyperspectral crop classification method that couples a multi-dimensional pyramid with a Transformer architecture. The model extracts crop features from spectral, spatial, and joint spectral-spatial dimensions to capture fine-grained characteristics. A feature reorganization strategy is further incorporated to effectively reduce dimensional redundancy, while the Transformer modules enhance global dependency modeling, thereby improving the discrimination of crop features in complex environments. Comparative experiments with six classical models on three datasets-Matiwan Village, WHU-HongHu, and WHU-LongKou-demonstrate that MDPC-Net achieves competitive accuracy with substantially lower computational complexity, effectively balancing the trade-off between classification performance and efficiency. The proposed approach provides a promising solution for fine-grained hyperspectral crop classification under limited sample conditions.

Low selenium bioavailability in selenium-rich soils represents a key constraint limiting selenium biofortification in agriculture. This study evaluated soil conditioning strategies to enhance selenium bioavailability, providing a theoretical foundation for efficient utilization of selenium-enriched soil resources. A pot experiment tested four soil conditioners: organic fertilizer, potassium humate, lime, and biochar, across three consecutive maize plantings. Soil conditioners effectively modified soil physicochemical properties: lime significantly increased pH and available phosphorus, while organic fertilizer increased available sulfur. These amendments markedly affected soluble and exchangeable selenium fractions. All treatments progressively increased the proportion of soluble selenium, with lime and biochar showing the most substantial gains in batches two and three (0.59%, 0.23%, 0.67%, and 0.30%, respectively). Organic fertilizer, lime, and biochar consistently elevated root selenium concentrations across all three batches by 7.79-11.01%, 33.31-135.41%, and 28.84-40.81%, respectively. Potassium humate increased root selenium by 9.04-26.42% in batches two and three. Notably, only lime consistently enhanced shoot selenium by 40.13-87.38% across all batches, while biochar increased shoot selenium by 5.60% in batch three. Plant selenium translocation analysis revealed that only lime treatment in batch three significantly increased the selenium transfer coefficient. Correlation analysis demonstrated a highly significant positive relationship between shoot selenium content and soil pH, whereas root selenium showed no significant correlation with soluble or exchangeable selenium fractions. In selenium-rich dryland soils, conditioner application increases soil pH, thereby enhancing selenium availability and root absorption. Lime proved most effective for increasing crop selenium content, while biochar also substantially improved soil selenium availability.

Introduction: Rhizosphere microbiome is affected and modulated by the complex mixtures of bioactive molecules that are released by plant roots. In this work, two promising plant growth-promoting strains of Streptomyces spp. (DEF17 and DEF19) were evaluated for their capacity to modulate tomato roots and exudates metabolic profile and influence Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici (Fol).

Methods: Dual culture assays, chemotropism assays, and in planta pathogenesis assays were performed to evaluate the capability of the strains to inhibit Fol growth, repel Fol conidia, and induce plant defense mechanisms both in vitro and in vivo. Finally, untargeted LC-MS/MS analysis was performed to understand which metabolites are produced and released by tomato roots after plant-bacteria interaction occurs.

Results: This study indicates that herbal formulas that could regulate the composition and proportion of gut microbiota have a positive effect in three stages (perioperative, postoperative, and advanced) of GC and CRC. They could promote the recovery of postoperative gastrointestinal function, increase tumor response, improve performance status, and reduce the incidence of adverse events. Herbal formulas exerted anti-cancer efficacy through multiple mechanisms and pathways; among them, the regulation of gut microbiota has not been paid enough attention. To further support the conclusion and better understand the role of gut microbiota in the treatment of GC and CRC, more rigorously designed, large-scale, and multicenter RCTs that focus on herbal formulas and gut microbiota are needed in the future.

Discussion: Together, these results indicated that tomato plant protection against Fol is consistent with DEF17 through exudate-mediated modulation, highlighting a gap between in vitro antagonism and in planta efficacy.

Introduction: The ridge-furrow planting system improves wheat grain filling and soil quality; however, the effects of appropriate ridge-furrow ratio on soil nutrient dynamics and nutrient-plant interaction and its potential response mechanism under ridge-furrow planting mode are still unclear. This study was designed to determine the optimal ratio and clarify the coupling relationships among soil nutrient availability, grain filling, and grain yield.

Methods: Through a two-year consecutive field experiment, the effects of traditional planting pattern (M1) and three ridge-furrow planting patterns (ridge-furrow ratio of 50 cm∶50 cm, 75 cm∶50 cm, and 100 cm∶50 cm; M2-M4) on grain filling, soil nutrient content, and grain yield of wheat were analyzed.

Results: Ridge-furrow patterns with varying ratios significantly affected wheat soil nutrient uptake and grain yield. Compared with other treatments, M3 treatment increased the activities of soluble amylase and bound starch synthase in the middle and late filling. At 21-28 days post-anthesis across two growing seasons, M3 increased amylose, amylopectin, and total starch accumulation by 7.21-23.37%, 7.86-22.71%, 7.72-22.88% and 7.15-23.06%, 7.80-21.93%, 7.66-22.07%, respectively. M3 treatment increased the maximum and average grain filling rate during filling, promoted grain filling of wheat, and obtained the highest grain weight. Moreover, M3 treatment is beneficial to improve soil fertility and promote the accumulation of microorganisms, thus creating a favorable environment for plant growth. Finally, the grain yield of M3 was 3.12-8.68% and 4.79-10.91% higher than other treatments, respectively, achieving the highest grain yield.

Discussion: In conclusion, our findings confirm that adopting the M3 ridge-furrow ratio is the optimal practice for winter wheat ridge-furrow cultivation in the North China Plain.