Stress simulation in plant tissue culture: pathways to sustainable forage crop improvement

Forage crops, which form the backbone of global livestock production, are increasingly threatened by multiple stressors such as biotic and abiotic stresses intensified by climate change. This review highlights plant tissue culture as a tool for exploring and enhancing stress tolerance through controlled regeneration systems. Tissue culture offers a controlled, reproducible and cost-effective platform for identifying and selecting stress tolerant variants. Techniques such as callus induction, organogenesis, somatic embryogenesis and in vitro exposure to biotic and abiotic agents have been effectively applied to major forage species. These approaches allow the rapid identification and propagation of stress-tolerant variants while minimizing limitations associated with traditional breeding. However, challenges such as genotype dependency, loss of regenerative potential and the inconsistency between in vitro and field responses underscore the need for deeper standardization of culture systems. Therefore, the development of in vitro stress simulation through plant tissue culture techniques offers a sustainable pathway for climate resilient forage cultivar production.