Sustainable plant-based management strategies for mitigating drought in vegetable crops: A review

Drought stress on vegetable crops significantly affect their plant growth and development resulting in reduced crop productivity and nutritional quality. Shallow root systems of the vegetable crops make them highly sensitive to drought stress. Therefore, sustainable drought mitigation strategies are required to alleviate drought stress for vegetable production under changing global environmental conditions. The current review focuses on key molecular mechanisms, including transcriptional factors and expression of stress-responsive genes, production of mitochondrial reactive oxygen species, modulation of signaling molecules, and circadian rhythm-mediated defense responses during onset of drought stress in vegetable crops. Further, plant-based mitigation strategies, such as use of phytomolecules, phytohormones, plant extracts, microbial endophytes, and drought-tolerant rootstocks from crop wild species for grafting onto vegetable crops are discussed for their role in enhancing drought resilience. Also, combining these strategies strengthens the antioxidant defense mechanism, osmotic homeostasis, and hormonal crosstalk under drought stress. Among the various strategies reported, phytomolecules, microbial endophytes, and drought-tolerant rootstocks from crop wild relatives are found to be promising for long-term field adaptations. The review further emphasizes future insights into plant-based solutions to enhance drought stress tolerance and integration of system biology approaches as well as field-based studies to develop climate-resilient, sustainable vegetable crop production system.