Drought stress poses a significant threat to global agricultural productivity, necessitating comprehensive understanding of plant adaptive strategies. Abscisic acid (ABA) improves plant physio-biochemical response against drought stress by maintaining stomatal regulation, osmo-protectant accumulation, and transcriptional reprogramming. Therefore, complete understanding of the ABA-based regulatory network is pivotal for engineering drought-resilient crops to combat climate change. This review summarizes ABA-centric networks in cereals, highlighting three key advances such as: (1) tissue-specific coordination of NCED3-mediated ABA biosynthesis, ABC/NPF transporter-dependent distribution, and CYP707A-driven catabolism fine-tunes drought responses; (2) epigenetic modifiers (ATX1-H3K4me3, miR169a-NF-YA5) establish stress memory, enabling accelerated reactivation of LEA-RD29 genes during recurrent drought; and (3) CRISPR-edited WRKY18 and root-specific OsNAC6 overexpression enhance resilience without yield reduction. This revise also discusses the ABA–jasmonate crosstalk as an unresolved frontier and futuristic approach that should prioritize multi-omics technologies such as CRISPR-Cas13 for specific RNA editing and field validation of epi-primed crops. Integrating these molecular insights will help advance climate-resilient agriculture and secure food production in drought-stressed areas of the world.
Aslam et al. (2025) studied this question.