Editorial: Genomic and biotechnological interventions for the concurrent improvement of stress resilience and seed-associated traits in crops.

Navigating the challenges posed by extreme climate variations and the rising global population is paramount in this century. To ensure food security for the rising global population in context of depleting resources and unfavourable environmental conditions is a challenging feat. Moreover, plant growth is shaped by a complex interplay of biotic and abiotic factors, encountered by a plant during reproductive stages, profoundly impacting seed yield and quality. This, in turn, resonates through agricultural productivity, leading to suboptimal land utilization and resource allocation. In response to these imminent challenges, researchers across the globe have engaged in the quest for the generation of climate-resilient crops. Their efforts are focussed on advancements in increasing photosynthesis efficiency, enhancing plant biomass, increasing seed yield, elevating nutritional attributes, and grain quality, utilizing both traditional breeding and cutting-edge molecular genetics approaches (Manna et al., 2021; Salvi et al., 2022b). Besides, the advent of gene-editing technologies has further reinforced these endeavours, showing promising outcomes. The cellular machinery modulates different aspects of plant metabolism, including sugar signalling, phytohormone regulation, transcription factors, ROS metabolism, etc, to adapt the stressful conditions and tackle yield loss (Kaur et al., 2021; Salvi et al., 2021; Salvi et al., 2022a; Kajal et al., 2023). This Research Topic determines the convergence of two pivotal facets of crop protection programs— strengthening environmental resilience and improving seed-associated traits. The Research Topic received six original research and one review article that focus on important aspects to amalgamate diverse studies that underscore the interconnection of these research themes.