Dear Colleagues,

This is a Special Issue invitation for collecting interesting papers that find proper solutions to plants in response to biotic and abiotic stress and that increase sustainable crop production. Abiotic stress, including environmental factors (temperature, water, humidity, light intensity, etc.), nutrient uptaking,  and minor or heavy metals, will limit or be highly associated with plant growth and development. Plants responding to abiotic stress have been explored from many different angles, such as in their physiology, signal transduction, breeding and genetics, and, in particular, in gene characterization. Today, developing sustainable more agricultural practices or strategies to address abiotic stress is a growing demand in the scientific community. For biotic stress, plant and microbe interactions have been extensively studied at many different levels, for example, quantitative and qualitative resistance identification, plant–pathogen (R-Avr) pathosystems, new biocontrol manners to alternate the chemicals for controlling diseases and pests, high-capacity secretory systems between plants and pathogens, secondary metabolisms, fungi genetics and biology, epidemiology, gene editing to investigate the function of plant resistance or fungal pathogenicity genes, and population genetics. The recent progress within next generation sequencing provides the possibility to generate a large amount of “omics” data, which can improve our understanding of  plant –(a)biotic stress interactions at genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic levels. Every year, a huge amount of economical loss in crops are caused by biotic and abiotic stress, either directly or indirectly, worldwide.

Thus, it is of great importance to consider plant responses to biotic and abiotic stress in order to maintain sustainable agricultural production, and we encourage researchers from around the world to submit research articles, reviews, perspectives, and brief communications to this Special Issue. The Special Issue will consider, but not be limited to, the following topics, (1) plant responses to environmental factors (temperature, humidity, light, etc.), (2) the impact of nutrient deficiency and heavy metal contamination in plant growth and development, (3) plant and pathogen interactions, (4) biocontrol strategy in crop protection, (5) understanding fungal/bacterial/virus disease dynamics, and (6) novel research updated approaches of particular interest.

Dr. Zhongwei Zou
Prof. Dr. Xujun Zhu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• abiotic stress
• biotic stress
• temperature
• tolerance
• plant pathogen
• plant disease
• minor elements
• biocontrol
• phytobiomes
• secondary metabolites
• secretome