Brassinosteroid-modified crops: key players for a modern Green Revolution

With the global population projected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, coupled with extreme weather events and resource scarcity, there is an urgent need to redesign existing Green Revolution varieties (GRVs) for a modern revolution in agriculture. Brassinosteroids (BRs) play crucial roles in shaping plant architecture and hold significant potential for developing modern GRVs that are high-yielding, climate-resilient and environmentally sustainable. Recent advances in crop improvement, particularly by manipulating BR signaling and biosynthesis genes, have already generated semi-dwarf GRVs. These BR-modified GRVs exhibited enhanced overall crop performance, including yield, photosynthetic capacity and nitrogen-use efficiency. However, they still face challenges regarding tolerance to various biotic and abiotic stresses, although studies on BR mutants have indicated that BRs can confer resilience to biotic and abiotic stresses. Despite such studies having made significant progress in exploring the role of BRs, their functions in crop species are not comprehensively understood. Therefore, additional BR mutants need to be developed to make existing crops climate-resilient and to tailor them to specific regional needs, such as increased frost tolerance in Eastern Europe. Ongoing efforts are focused on identifying candidate BR-related genes in crops to reveal the regulatory mechanisms underlying BR signaling and biosynthesis, thereby improving overall performance. This review highlights recent advances in BR research related to crop improvement and stress adaptation. Moreover, it emphasizes the potential of BRs to drive a new generation of BR-modified GRVs and outlines strategies to achieve this by manipulating BR signaling and biosynthesis pathways to develop high-yield, climate-resilient crops.